Narrating Africa: George Henty and the Fiction of Empire (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

NARRATING AFRICA

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE VOLUME 9 GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 2121

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE JACK ZIPES, Series Editor

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE COMES OF AGE Toward a New Aesthetic by Maria Nikolajeva REDISCOVERIES IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE by Suzanne Rahn REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys by Beverly Lyon Clark WHITE SUPREMACY IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900 by Donnarae MacCann RETELLING STORIES, FRAMING CULTURE Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum THE CASE OF PETER RABBIT Changing Conditions of Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey LITTLE WOMEN AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays edited by Janice M.Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark IDEOLOGIES OF IDENTITY IN ADOLESCENT FICTION by Robyn McCallum NARRATING AFRICA

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE iii

George Henty and the Fiction of Empire by Mawuena Kossi Logan

NARRATING AFRICA GEORGE HENTY AND THE FICTION OF EMPIRE

MAWUENA KOSSI LOGAN

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC. A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP NEW YORK AND LONDON 1999

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Copyright © 1999 by Mawuena Kossi Logan All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narrating Africa: George Henty and the fiction of empire/by Mawuena Kossi Logan. p. cm.—(Garland reference Library of the humanities; vol. 2121. Children’s literature and culture; vol. 9.) Based on the author’s dissertation. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-3275-0 (alk. paper) 1. Henty, G.A. (George Alfred). 1832–1902—Knowledge—Africa. 2. Henty, G.A. (George Alfred), 1832–1902—Political and social views. 3. Children’s stories, English—History and criticiam. 4. Adventure stories, English—History and criticism. 5. English fiction—African influences. 6. Boys—England—Books and reading. 7. Imperialism in literature. 8. Africa—In Literature. 9. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. II. Series: Garland reference of the humanities. Children’s literature and culture; v. 9. PR4785.H5Z75 1999 823'.8–dc21 99–11196 CIP ISBN 0-203-90501-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-90594-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-8153-3275-0 (Print Edition)

To my mother and father, to all my family, relatives, and friends

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Contents

Preface Introduction

x xiv

CHAPTER 1 Africa and Europe: The Historic Encounter and Its Legacy 3 Africa before the Atlantic Slave Trade 3 The Atlantic Slave Trade 4 Abolition: Humanitarianism or Capitalism? 9 Colonization and the Image of Africa 15 “Race” and Pseudoscience 19 CHAPTER 2 Pre-Henty: Juvenile Novels and the British Empire Defoe and the Adventure Novel: Robinson Crusoe The School Story: Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays Captain Marryat’s Masterman Ready W.H.G.Kingston’s In the Wilds of Africa Ballantyne’s Black Ivory CHAPTER 3 To Africa With Henty: The Socio-Cultural Background Romance and Imperialist Wars: From the School to the Battlefield History, Ethnography, and Persistent Stereotypes Henty: The Favorite Boys’ Author The Henty Hero

25 30 36 41 47 52 64 71 74 77 80

CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER 4 To Africa with Henty: The Gold Coast and the Sudan By Sheer Pluck The Dash for Khartoum With Kitchener in the Sudan

84 85 93 102

CHAPTER 5 To South Africa with Henty The Young Colonists With Buller in Natal, or a Born Leader With Roberts to Pretoria

111 113 120 127

CHAPTER 6 Henty’s Literary Compatriots: Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad King Solomon’s Mines Heart of Darkness

137 139 151

CHAPTER 7 Conclusion: Legacy and Impact of NineteenthCentury Juvenile Literature

165

Works Consulted

187

Index

197

Preface

Say it loud I’m Black and proud Say it loud I’m Black and proud…. —James Brown

“Why is it necessary for someone to write a song that celebrates Black pride?” Growing up in a country that did not call for the affirmation of Black pride, I used to ask myself this question. In the 1970s, we danced to James Brown’s music without any serious thought of why or how he came to sing “I’m Black and proud.” Although I was familiar with the history of the Black diaspora, segregation, Jim Crow, lynchings, and racism were not part of our everyday reality and vocabulary—they were foreign. It was not until I came to the United States, first in the summer of 1985 as a camp counselor, and in 1988 to study, that I began to understand and appreciate the import of James Brown’s lyrics: the need for the affirmation of Black pride. I came to realize that it was—and still is—necessary to articulate that pride, because “I’m Black and proud” was necessitated by the way racism was affecting the lives of African Americans. Unlike the writers of empire discussed in this book—writers who proclaimed the white supremacy myth—James Brown neither spoke of Black “superiority,” nor White “inferiority.” My work on Henty’s African novels is a step toward understanding the essence of James Brown’s “I’m Black and proud”—an essence designed to counter works such as Henty’s. My sojourn in the United

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States has led me to the realization that Henty’s ideas (myths) are still prevalent; it then becomes expedient to “deconstruct” these myths since they touch everyone’s life, directly or indirectly. My critique of Henty’s novels was partly motivated by my desire to understand from a social, historical, literary, theoretical, and cultural perspective the ways in which the myths of yesterday are perpetuated. Prior to the advent of television, books were the vehicle through which those myths were conveyed: the adventure story that told of the “jungle” and “desert” islands steaming with cannibals, seems to hold the key to unearthing, analyzing, and assessing twentieth-century racial stereotyping vis-à-vis Africans and people of African descent. Chapter 1 historicizes British overseas empire-building, its precursors, legacy, and impact on the image of Africans reflected both in nineteenth-century juvenile literature and twentieth-century attitudes and policies. Chapter 2 discusses Henty’s predecessors as well as the role their juvenile novels and public institutions (such as the public school system and the Boy Scouts) played in perpetuating racial myths and ideologies which advanced the British imperialist cause. In chapter 3, I address the socio-cultural background of Henty’s novels set in Africa and focus on the ways in which writers of empire, anthropologists, and ethnographers rewrote and distorted the history of Africa, thereby perpetuating racial stereotypes. Chapter 4 is a critique of Henty’s three novels set in West and North-East Africa. In chapter 5, I focus on the three South African novels; chapter 6 discusses Henty’s literary compatriots, Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad. The concluding chapter evaluates the impact and legacy of the fiction of empire on twentieth-century attitudes to race relations. It focuses on the effects of the colonial encounter and wars both on the colonized and the colonizer in an effort to undermine Henty’s glorification of these wars, and to highlight the ways in which similar narratives distorted, rewrote, and romanticized the history of the colonized. I hope this project will open new avenues in literary history and in the study of reading responses in the young. Ideally, reading materials for young adults will be less readily taken for granted—materials that play a crucial role in the education of the young in the multicultural world of the twentieth century and beyond. I believe prejudice is taught and can be unlearned if we can identify juvenile literature as one of the ways in which society teaches values, assumptions, and prejudices. Writing or undertaking a project is a community effort. I am

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indebted to the community of professors, scholars, and friends who gave assistance during the dissertation phase of this book. My sincere and special thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Florence Boos, for her commitment, patience, and guidance, and to Professor Donnarae MacCann for her unceasing assistance. I am grateful to Professors Jack Zipes, Teresa Mangum, Frederick Woodard, and Jeff Cox for their timely remarks and suggestions. I would also like to thank Jacque Roethler, secretary of the African American World Studies Program, and Vicky Dingman, graduate secretary of the Department of English for their help. This project might not have been possible without the help and assistance from my uncle Gabriel Hope Akator, and Professors Nadou Lawson and Rosemary Yaco at my home institution in Togo, Université du Benin. I am equally indebted to the late Dr. Darwin Turner and the late Professor Jonathan Walton. My special thanks go to my extended family and my friends who, in their unique ways, directly or indirectly, made a contribution to this project. Namely, I would like to thank Konan Amani, Pamela Dautremont, Anita Gonzalez, and Ingrid Wehrle-Ray for their support and words of encouragement.

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Introduction

[C]olonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Imperial relations may have been established initially by guns, guile and disease, but they were maintained in their interpellative phase largely by textuality…. [A]s an operation of discourse [colonialism] interpellates colonial subjects by incorporating them in a system of representation…. The children who read The WaterBabies1 in England in the 1860s were not just being entertained with a pleasing fantasy narrative, but being instructed in the ‘innate’ hierarchies of race and nation. It is when children of the colonies read such texts and internalize their own subjection that the true work of colonial textuality is done. —Chris Tiffin and Allan Lawson, De-Scribing Empire

Fiction, to be sure, is a social product but it also produces society…. It plays a large part in the socialisation of

INTRODUCTION xv

infants in the conduct of politics,and in general gives symbols and modes of life to the population. —Joan Rockwell, Fact in Fiction

In Racialised Barriers: The Black Experience in the United States and England in the 1980s, Stephen Small argues that “identifying and combating racialised hostility was made more difficult in the 1980s due to the fact that each country shared a focus on the use of antidiscrimination laws in the field of policy as the mechanism for diffusing social conflict and breaking down patterns of disadvantage and discrimination” (Small 12–13). Although discrimination and disadvantage are partly rooted in economic conditions and require strict antidiscrimination legislation, as Small points out, they are also embedded in notions of binary oppositions, notions of “White superiority” and “Black inferiority,” and consolidated informally through fiction for young adults. “Identifying and combating racialised hostility” may become even more difficult when it has been informally inoculated through fiction and at a tender age. This book is, first and foremost, a critique of the colonialist discourse that ironically purports to bring “law and order” to “uncivilized” blank corners of the world where “tribal” wars supposedly reigned. Instead of “law and order,” we could say that it was European “tribal” wars that led to the formal partition and conquest of Africa in the nineteenth century—wars that still continue today in industrialized, therefore “civilized,” nations in various, but not so obvious, forms. The study focuses on George Henty’s African novels as a prototype of the literature that emerged with the rise of British imperialism—the literature that legitimized the deeds of the British empire, better known today as the “fiction of empire.” More specifically, my work aims at evaluating the role of nineteenth-century juvenile literature in the systematic construction and perpetuation of stereotypes vis-à-vis Africans and people of African descent. This is not to say that the conception of these stereotypes was synchronistic with the advent of nineteenth-century juvenile literature, but to stress that the image of the African as barbarian, savage, or inferior being, resulting from the activities of the Atlantic Slave Trade and early Victorian explorers and missionaries, had become commonplace by the mid-nineteenth-century in juvenile literature. This image won further popularity among Victorians from all walks of life through the adventure story. It is my con-

xvi NARRATING AFRICA

tention that in order to understand the present, one has to decode the past. In other words, the cultural, economic, and political hegemony of Europe and the United States over Africa has a legacy deeply rooted in nineteenth-century ideologies and theories of imperialism, colonialism, “race,” and the repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In an attempt to dismantle the myths and stereotypes endemic to colonialist discourse, I intend to critique the literature from different perspectives (historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, literary). My theoretical approach is “postcolonial” in that it entails critical reading practices that take into account the contexts and conditions (social, political, historical, economic, cultural, and philosophical) that enable the production, reception, and import of literary texts. According to Helen Tiffin, postcolonial counter-discursive strategies involve a “mapping of the dominant discourse, a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the dis/mantling of these assumptions from the cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified ‘local’“ (Helen Tiffin 23). While acknowledging the restrictiveness of definitions, Bart Moore-Gilbert defines postcolonial criticism as “a more or less distinct set of reading practices…preoccupied principally with the analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of dominance and subordination—economic, cultural and political—between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neocolonialism” (Moore-Gilbert 12). These definitions are broad enough to encompass my theoretical approach; but what does the term postcolonial connote? In “How Post-Colonial Is African Literature” Niyi Osundare notes the inadequacy of the term postcolonial: does it mean “beyond-colonial, past-colonial, after-colonial, free-from-colonial, anti-colonial, or simply not-colonial?” (Osundare 207). Granted the differences among the cultures of the colonized peoples, and granted the different colonial practices utilized by various colonizers, it would be unrealistic to think that the colonial experience of an Australian or a New Zealander is identical with that of a Nigerian or a Senegalese, even though there are definite similarities. To do this would amount to oversimplification. More importantly, can we really talk about a postcolonial era when the colonial structures, institutions, and ideologies that were oppressive to the realities of the African people remained intact in the wake of decolonization, and

INTRODUCTION xvii

when the West still controls the economies of the newly independent nations? As Osundare puts it, “we need a new dictionary of contemporary literary terms” because “to apply the term post-colonial to the real situation in Africa today is to be plainly naive or majestically futuristic, no matter what the degree of metaphoric extension we are prepared to grant that term” (Osundare 208). It is equally naive to assume that these labels are in themselves the carriers of “truth,” or the key to a better and in-depth analysis of the texts we intend to critique. Referring to Heart of Darkness: A Case Study In Contemporary Criticism (Murfin), a book on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Osundare argues that instead of new insights, the critics do not discuss the dehumanization of Africans, but “simply join Conrad in a ‘poststructuralist,’ ‘post-colonialist’ voyage down the Congo, they too being ‘wanderers on a prehistoric earth,’ surrounded by ‘black shadows,’ black bones,’ cannibals splashing around and pushing, appalled by the ‘smelly mud’ of the Congo—several miles, several centuries away from ‘the tranquil dignity’ of the Thames. To them, too, Africa is nothing more than a ‘wild and passionate uproar’“ (Osundare 210). In short, to term the writing that challenges racist assumptions in colonialist discourse as postcolonial underestimates the various activities— besides writing and prior to the coining of that term—that forced colonial powers out of those colonized countries. What about the “unlettered” men and women who carried out an armed struggle against the British in Kenya during the so-called Mau Mau crisis? How do the “once-colonized” peoples feel about their new label? As Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian novelist and playwright suggests, “colonialism has not been posted anywhere at all…. Ask any village woman how postcolonial her life is” (quoted in Chreachain 5–6). Because of the ambiguity implied in the term postcolonial, and because one of the objectives of this project is to resist the distortion of African history by the West, adopting such labels will defeat my purpose. Naming is an important undertaking in many cultures, including those of the West. I think this is why we have Victorian Falls in Tanzania, or Boulevard François Mitterand in Togo. As Osundare remarks, names tell stories; they can liberate and imprison. Names can even be self-fulfilling (Osundare 208). Among the Ewe people and many African cultures people do care about the names they give their children who are expected to live up to the repute of their names. I do not believe that Africans are that comfortable with their new names, be they “Third World,” “developing country,” or “postcolonial,”

xviii NARRATING AFRICA

because these names essentially connote those racist assumptions we intend to dismantle. Can we talk about post-colonialism when a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, Pat Buchanan, echoed the nineteenth-century colonial mentality in reference to immigration? He argued: I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”2

Buchanan may have forgotten that between the seventeenth and midnineteenth centuries, Zulus were among those shipped to the United States as slaves, and during that time there had been no question as to whether the Zulus could be assimilated or if they “would cause less problems for the people of Virginia.” In fact, Buchanan’s comments are reminiscent of those of a British M.P., Enoch Powell, who believes that “all men are equal” but “equal in the sight of God.” It is quite interesting that in the 1970s this M.P. would argue that “the law of Christ knows nothing of the British Empire, knows nothing of nations and nationalities at all” (Powell 88–89). Again, like Buchanan, he may have forgotten that the British Empire was built on a so-called divine mission to “civilize” the rest of the globe. Like Buchanan, Powell views the immigration issue in the United Kingdom as constituting “the threat of the future:” [T]he problem of race relations in this country—how I hate that expression ‘race relations’!—the problem (I would rather say) of the consequences of Commonwealth immigration in this country, is not how this present million and a quarter get on with this present fifty million, but how we can prevent that million and a quarter attaining a size which, linked with their concentration, will be intolerable and unmanageable. (Powell 93)

Although there have been some breakthroughs in pointing out the damage done by the (mis)representation of people of Africa and of African descent, race relations—a term Powell hates with intensity— have not gotten better, and colonialist and imperialist ideologies are with us dressed in a different garb called postcolonial. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian dramatist, novelist, and critic points out in Myth, Literature and the African World:

INTRODUCTION xix

We [Africans] have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses, and their value systems. (Soyinka x)

“Postcoloniality” as a socio-political and cultural condition of Africa is a farce. Today, the cultural hegemony of Europe and the United States over the rest of the world informs us that the economic and cultural productions of Africa are still controlled by the “former” colonizers through language. As Tiffin and Lawson have argued, “imperial relations may have been established initially by guns, guile and disease, but they were maintained in their interpellative phase largely by textuality” (Tiffin and Lawson 3). So, welcome aboard. But before we visit Crusoe’s island, or cruise with Marlow (with Conrad telling him how to steer the boat along the Congo), or visit Haggard’s mines in search of gold, or before we make “The Dash for Khartoum” “By Sheer Pluck” with “The Young Colonists” “True to the Old Flag” with Henty as a war correspondent, let us ask ourselves how “post,” “posted,” or “past” are the colonial experiences narrated by these authors, or how “post” are Powell’s and Buchanan’s comments. The connection between literature for the young and other aspects of social life applies to all historical epochs. Guy Arnold, one of Henty’s recent biographers, looks closely at the “general concept of White superiority” in his works, and notes how that concept persists in modern times. He tells of the formation of a Henty Society in Great Britain in 1977—an indication of Henty’s enduring reputation. But it is not surprising that century-old children’s books continue to be promoted. The political messages of Henty’s African novels are part of the background for new political debates revolving around South African apartheid. The British dialogue over apartheid is particularly noticeable because Great Britain, in 1989, was at odds with other members of the British Commonwealth over the issue of economic sanctions. It is not important to take up the details of the Kuala Lampur Commonwealth conference here, but only to note that debates over British policies toward South Africa were still, in the 1980s, linked to nineteenth-century policies over European empire-building and maintenance.3 Likewise, some of the conflicts that plague the world today are closely related to European empire-building. For instance, the 1885 arbitrary partition of Africa in Berlin (commonly

xx NARRATING AFRICA

referred to as the Scramble for Africa) in the absence of African representatives, and without regard to Africans’ ethnic and religious affiliations, helped engender many subsequent conflicts, the most recent being the civil war in Somalia. Similar arbitrary divisions in the Middle East created years-long conflict between Egypt and Israel, and more recently, between Iraq and Kuwait. The present warfare between factions in Northern Ireland is the result of the initial British attempt at colonization as early as the sixteenth century. One could go on citing examples of the impact and legacy of European colonial endeavor. To understand such a long-lasting phenomenon, we need to consider the historical background to British overseas empire-building, its precursors, legacy, and impact on attitudes and policies. We need to examine the logistical connections between the rise of capitalism and the abolition of slavery in Britain. We need to explore the degree to which missionaries, explorers and traders, who first wrote about the African continent, were ultimately less concerned with the salvation of the so-called heathens, than they were with the pacification of the Africans in order to assume the exploitation of the resources of the continent and to create consumers for European markets. In this first chapter, I shall historicize British empire-building with such factors in mind. NOTES 1. The Water-Babies (1863) is a children’s adventure story by Charles Kingsley (1819–1875). It relates the adventures of Tom, a chimney-sweep who falls into a river and becomes a water-baby. The novel condemns child labor, deplores working-class sanitation, but more importantly it “reworks Darwin’s evolutionary theory to accommodate Kingsley’s ‘muscular Christianity’“ (Chris Tiffin and Allan Lawson 177). According to Jo-Ann Wallace, the unabridged Macmillan edition of The Water-Babies contains passages such as: “whether you have found Vendale or not, you will have found such a country, and such a people, as ought to make you proud of being a British boy,” or “[Tom] was not a bit frightened. Why should he be? He was a brave English lad, whose business is to go out and see all the world.” She argues, that “the intended middle-class, male, child reader” of The Water-Babies is “clearly being prepared for his role in managing less fully developed Others, whether working classes of his domestic environ-

INTRODUCTION xxi

ment or the native Others of the colonies.” The above passages and other similar ones are deleted in the Puffin edition (Chris Tiffin and Allan Lawson, De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonilism and Textuality 171–81). 2. Quoted in the New York Times, 25 Mar. 1996: Section A, p.15. 3. The Commonwealth dispute at the Kuala Lampur conference was sparked by Prime Minister Thatcher’s disapproval of economic sanctions against South Africa and a communique to that effect, although she had already signed the communique prepared in conjunction with the forty-nine Commonwealth members recommending sanctions. In February 1990 Great Britain removed the ban against new investments, despite opposition from the E.E.C. (European Economic Community). Another race-related dispute concerns entry of British passport holders into the British Isles from Hong Kong. The Thatcher government proposes that 50,000 (out of 3.5 million) be admitted and that they be “key” people exclusively—those in law, commerce, medicine, and colonial administration. Such specific “status” tests are rarely imposed upon White immigrants (SeeChristian Science Monitor 27 Oct. 1989:4, 19 Dec. 1989:3, and 28 Feb. 1990:4).

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CHAPTER 1

Africa and Europe The Historic Encounter and Its Legacy

AFRICA BEFORE THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE It is a paradox that in the fifteenth century, when Europe was about to embark on its sea voyages of explorations and conquest, Africans, who were far from being backward would be chained and shipped to the New World as slaves. According to historians Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, “[i]n pre-historic times—at least through all the long millennia of the Paleolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’—Africa was not even relatively backward: it was in the lead” (Oliver and Fage 14). These historians contend that until the late nineteenth century African peoples were organized into states and communities powerful enough to deter invaders and migrants from overseas. They state that “[t]he real reason why the Europeans did not go inland and seize the gold mines of West Africa or Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), for example, was that the Africans there were already well enough organized to exploit these resources themselves. It was in large measure the progress already made by the Africans in earlier centuries that enabled them to resist the modern age for so long” (Oliver and Fage 14). Michael Craton in his Sinews of Empire notes that medieval European traders and commentators, hesitant to concede that African kingdoms were powerful and sophisticated enough to deter intruders from penetrating into West Africa, often cited geographical and climatic reasons (Craton 15). In her recent book Race in North America, Audrey Smedley points out that during the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers (who knew more about the geography of the world than their European counterparts) left“excellent descriptions of great states, from the empire of Mali in West Africa to those of India and China” (Smedley 3

4 NARRATING AFRICA

43). Among these Muslim travelers was Al-Idrisi, geographer and cartographer of the early twelfth century, one of the first geographers to reveal that the world was round (Smedley 43). This evidence of the sophistication of West African kingdoms and empires leaves us with questions as to how the Atlantic Slave Trade, also referred to as the Triangular Trade, succeeded in taking hold of that very part of Africa that was once outside European invasion and gaze. Why did Africans sell their kin? What was the force behind the slave trade that changed the image of Africans? To answer these questions we must turn to events in the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade. THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE The traffic in slaves that the English came to dominate in the seventeenth century was initiated by the Portuguese who carried a party of African captives to Lisbon in 1441; by 1495 they had already established a small trade in slaves from Guinea. On the island of Sao Tome, long before Columbus landed in the West Indies, Portuguese settlers had developed a sugar cane industry which utilized African slaves from the nearby coast (Craton 4). In fact the English began trading in African slaves in 1560 when John Hawkins “plundered, stole and kidnapped hundreds of people from the West Coast of Africa.” In 1567 the Queen herself, Elizabeth I, invested in Hawkins’s slaving endeavors (Smedley 72–73). The royal family became openly involved in the trade in 1663 with the formation of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England in Africa (Ofosu-Appiah 24). Later Francis Drake, Hawkins’s cousin, made a fortune through the pillage of Spanish vessels (Smedley 73). The building of the British Empire may have begun with the ascendance of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 to the throne, at the age of twentyfive. English society of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries experienced significant social, economic, and religious turmoil. Queen Elizabeth’s reign began as the nobility had started to decay and the “common people had fallen into a state of such disorder that the villages and towns were thronged with idle tramps and vagabonds, and the roads with highwaymen” (Story 4). The dissolution of the monasteries and the disappearance of the old nobility as a consequence of the Wars of the Roses worsened living conditions: small tenants had been evicted and had gone to increase the number of those seeking employment in trade and adventure—activities that came to dominate

AFRICA AND EUROPE 5

the era. The reduction in religious commitments also contributed to the spirit of adventure and trade. Ships were being built, companies were formed, and most importantly gunpowder had been invented in the mid-fourteenth century. This brought about a change in the art of war: the old armorclad knight gave way to fire arms (Story 10–12). It is worth noting that it was at the end of the fifteenth century (1494) that the Pope divided all the newly “discovered, yet unexplored ‘heathen’ lands of the world between Spain and Portugal,” and this arbitrary division provided a stimulus to adventure worldwide (Smedley 44). The sixteenth century marked the emergence of a bourgeois class: a class of merchants engaged in overseas trade, and bankers, artisans, and industrialists came into being with a lifestyle of material consumption. Individualism, private property, and the accumulation of wealth became dominant cultural values (Smedley 45–47). Alan Macfarlane remarked that capitalist ideology (individualism, wage labor, land commoditization, geographic and social mobility, and a setback in kinship ties and arranged marriages) had already taken hold of the English as early as the thirteenth century (Smedley 49). Thus capitalism and mercantilism had begun to take shape prior to the British trade in African slaves. These socio-economic changes within English society, plus the English awareness of profitable colonial enterprises held by the Spaniards and Portuguese, their newly acquired taste for sugar and spices, and the spirit of adventure that began to dominate the English mind were the main motives behind the British involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Smedley 72). This period, dominated by an emerging capitalist and mercantile class, also witnessed a decline of the aristocracy since titles could now be bought with money. The accumulation of wealth became the determining factor of one’s status in society. These changes not only gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, they also accounted for the cruel and inhumane treatment of African slaves, considered as property in the New World. Michael Craton notes: A man, therefore, becomes the standard of prices. A slave is a note of hand that may be discounted or pawned; he is a bill of exchange that carries himself to his destination and pays a debt bodily; he is a tax that walks corporately into the chieftain’s treasure, (xx)

6 NARRATING AFRICA

Meanwhile, the English maritime technologies had supplanted those of Spain and Portugal. The English confirmed their control over the seas and later the lands in North America when they defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 (Smedley 62). By this time in Africa, the glories of the Old World had been forgotten: the three empires of Ghana (eleventh century), Mali (thirteenth century), Songhai (fourteenth century), and other kingdoms had collapsed in the wake of civil wars and outside invaders; it therefore became much easier for slave traders to wage war against communities whose captives were shipped to North America and the Caribbean. During the early 1600s, the demand for labor in the newly conquered North American territories prompted the English to look to Africa after attempts to enslave the indigenous American peoples and to coerce downtrodden women, men, and children from the streets of Liverpool and Bristol into servitude had failed (Smedley 102). Previous attempts had been made to colonize and enslave the Irish people as early as 1169. The Irish resistance to English colonization and enslavement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries angered many Britons who spoke of the “wild” Irish. William Thomas maintained that the Irish people were “unreasonable beasts who knew neither God nor good manners” (Smedley 56). According to Smedley, the English perception of the Irish was concretized into an image embodied in the term savage. To the English, the savage was wicked, “heathen,” barbarous, someone who was “given to lying, stealing, treachery, murder, and double-dealing” (Smedley 60). The irony, here, is that the English had used treachery, murder, barbarous acts, and double-dealing successively in Ireland, North America, and Africa to coerce the indigenous people into submitting to English authority. The Irish experience with the English speaks to the fact that the skin pigmentation of the Africans did not cause slavery and, therefore, their degradation. But as we shall see, skin pigmentation marked the Africans as a distinct group, easy targets. Historian Eric Williams in his classic Capitalism and Slavery argues that it was slavery that caused the degradation of the African, and consequently led to racism since unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, yellow, Catholic, Protestant, and pagan (Williams 7). Besides, in the New World, it was more convenient for European enslavers to impose permanent slave status on the Africans who, besides being thousands of miles away from home, were unprotected by any laws. For instance, the poor and homeless of the streets of Liverpool and Bristol, and the Irish who were shipped

AFRICA AND EUROPE 7

off to the West Indies as indentured servants, some of whom were convicts at home, were protected by the laws of their countries (Smedley 105). Smedley remarks that the degradation of the African is “best understood in the broadest historical context, encompassing economic and material explanations along with cultural-historical ones,” namely the English “belief in their own superiority, which already bordered on racism fed by a newfound and sometimes fanatical Anglo-Saxonism” (Smedley 101–102) But to what extent can we hold Africans accountale for the Atlantic Slave Trade? Does servitude in Africa justify the Atlantic Slave Trade? Given the difference between African servitude and chattel slavery in the New World, the European excuse for slavery is insupportable. Basil Davidson argues that the slave as property had no equivalence in Africa. What Arabs and Europeans termed slave, he argues, could literally be translated as ‘abid, but the ‘abid in Africa also held a position of high responsibility and served as agents of inland kings. According to Davidson, Europeans could not understand how slaves in Africa had so much authority and could command the “disposal and even the consumption of considerable wealth” (Huggins et al. 59–62). Olaudah Equiano makes the same distinction between slavery in Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade. In his autobiography The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano, who was a slave both in West Africa and the West Indies, argues that a slave in Africa is not a subhuman, but is instead comparable to an indentured servant: the slave (usually a prisoner of war) worked for his master for an agreed number of years and was then free to go back to his people or to stay in that community. Equiano describes the condition of servitude among the Ibo of Nigeria: “they were only prisoners of war, as such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and other crimes as we esteemed heinous” (Equiano 7). In retrospect, one can argue that since plantation or chattel slavery was unknown to sub-Saharan Africa, African collaborators could not have fathomed the devastating implications of their involvement in the trade. This argument does not, in any way, nullify the African agency regarding the trade in humans. But we should not forget that Africans never crossed the Atlantic with a shipload of slaves for sale and that their active participation neither happened overnight nor without European manipulation. The Guinea Coast of West Africa had long been dominated by kingdoms and states that traded in gold, ivory, and spices with European countries—a trade that later turned into commerce in humans. African

8 NARRATING AFRICA

leaders usually signed contracts with European merchants who were given land on the coast to build trading centers. As the demand for labor in the New World increased, so did the demand for slaves. Initially, the slaves were prisoners of war, criminals, or people who had sold themselves into servitude to pay off their debts, but as time wore on and the demand for slaves became even greater, European nations devised means whereby slaves could be easily appropriated, besides kidnapping (Ofosu-Appiah 20–23). The introduction of firearms enhanced the availability of slaves at the early stages of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Historian Philip Curtin maintains that “it is possible, in fact, that the availability of firearms set off a gun-slave cycle in which an African state used the arms to capture more slaves, to buy more arms, and so on—forcing African states to take up slave raiding in selfprotection, since guns could only be bought with slaves” (Huggins et al 89). As early as 1567, John Hawkins made an alliance with the king of Sierra Leone, and as a result, a company of Africans and English mercenaries raided a neighboring town of about ten thousand inhabitants; Hawkins was able to set out for Spain with 470 captives1 (Davidson, The African Slave Trade 82–83). A frequently cited defense of the Atlantic Slave Trade was that the “heathen” received the blessings of Christianity in the New World. Since all Africans could not be transported to North America and the Caribbean for salvation, proponents of this theory rationalized that they could “save” a few who would return to the “heathen” lands as missionaries. But history informs us that the Africans were meant to be slaves for life. It is quite obvious that this “improvement” was a smoke screen to enslave Africans for labor.2 Marimba Ani notes that Europeans still practiced, until the eleventh century, what Christians would later call pagan religions (Ani 166). But amazingly, it is Europe that would spearhead the “salvation” of the “heathen” souls in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Why should a people who had persecuted Christians (Jesus et al.) and then become Christians themselves, enslave and kill others in order to convert them? Ani’s comments are illuminating: she asserts that Christianity was suited to the European utamaroho (that is: character, attitude, aesthetic in a collective sense), because pagan Indo-European culture was violent, aggressive, xenophobic, and individualistic. Ani maintains that pagan Europeans, unlike European Christians, did not use religion as an excuse for expanding their territories, and perhaps this is why paganism was considered backward by European imperial powers in the wake of the so-

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called civilizing mission. Christianity offered a solution to backwardness by being violent in the name of God (Ani 166–7). This perspective is an interesting one in that Christianity has always been associated with civilization, and progress, and one wonders if violence was considered a prerequisite for a civilized society. Who is the God that cannot convey his or her message peacefully? It is not surprising that at the height of Christian missionary work Africans, especially subSaharan Africans, found it difficult to understand the brotherhood Christianity preaches, and many refused to be converted. The salvation theory in relation to the slave trade and colonization is untenable. All Europe needed was ammunition. Undoubtedly the Atlantic Slave Trade strengthened the British economy,3 but as time wore on people were drawn into fighting against the trade for different reasons. Despite the economic benefits of slavery, and thereby the strong opposition to antislavery movements, the “peculiar institution” did come to an end by the mid-nineteenth century in Britain. But the trade created a degrading set of conditions that did not disappear with abolition and emancipation. How then was the slave trade and chattel slavery abolished and colonization substituted? ABOLITION: HUMANITARIANISM OR CAPITALISM? The Emancipation Bill of 1833 put an end to both the Atlantic Slave Trade and slavery in Britain and her colonies. This bill resulted from different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas and ideologies. In retrospect we are led to ask why Britain decided to emancipate the Africans after centuries of enslavement. Had the slave suddenly acquired a higher status that would call for his or her emancipation? Did the aristocratic Whig government discover a compelling reason to collaborate with the Evangelicals to pass the bill? (Kriegel 423). Humanitarianism was obviously at work, but beyond it, other forces seemed to be instrumental in the passing of the bill. In the late eighteenth century for example, England was dealing with a hungry and homeless Black population. In 1786 the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (a humanitarian committee) was established to relocate London’s Black population in the West African country of Sierra Leone due to their worsening living conditions (Sheldon Harris 43–44). As early as 1601, Queen Elizabeth I, concerned with the increasing number of Blacks in London (some of whom were ex-slaves), issued a royal proclamation ordering all “blackamoores” out of the kingdom.

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By 1772 fifteen thousand Blacks were confirmed to be living in London, a number that increased as ex-slaves in the United States who had fought on the losing British side were transported to Britain at the end of the American War of Independence. The social conditions of these Blacks produced a humanitarian initiative inspired by Granville Sharp to repatriate London’s poor Blacks to Sierra Leone as an agricultural community, with the help of the British government. Repatriation never solved the problem because the idea attracted very few Blacks. Those who went were later abandoned, and their freedom was curtailed by the fact that the slave trade was still in full swing. The Black presence in London brought about a host of concerns, namely the fear of miscegenation associated with the alleged bestial sexuality of the African, and the threat free Blacks posed to limited job opportunities4 (Walvin 8–12). Giving shape and direction to the humanitarian initiative, Sharp took it on himself to speak against the slave trade and to defend runaway slaves, in particular, James Somerset.5 Another philanthropist, John Wesley wrote Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) which had a large circulation, and turned a body of Methodists against the trade in humans. After visiting a disease-ridden slave ship and seeing for himself the mistreatment of the slaves, James Ramsey, a naval surgeon, decided to campaign against slavery. With the publication of “Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies” in 1784, Ramsey joined the ranks of humanitarians such as William Wilberforce, William Dickson, and the Quaker abolitionists. In 1783 British Quakers formed the Committee of London Meeting and Sufferings and presented to Parliament a petition to end the trade (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 353). In 1786 Thomas Clarkson published “An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species” which won him a prize at Cambridge. In this essay Clarkson argued that the slave trade was not profitable because of the loss of thousands of seamen and that commerce in commodities would yield two or three times the returns of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Raw materials, he noted, could be bought at a cheap price in Africa. He also observed that slavery was immoral, and that the creation in the colonies of a “self-sustaining labor force” that would consume British produce was more necessary than the slave trade (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 353). But on the whole, Clarkson approached the issue of slavery as a “problem of morality and natural jurisprudence” (Drescher 565). When abo-

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litionism became a national political movement, Clarkson published another essay, “Essay on Impolicy of the African Slave Trade,” which was “responsive” to the antiabolitionists’ main argument that the slave trade was beneficial to the nation. In 1791 the Abolitionist Society presented a document before the House of Commons: “Abstract of Evidence before the House of Commons.” This document expressed the concerns of Clarkson’s two essays: it stressed the inhumane treatment of slaves in Africa, during the Middle Passage, and in the Caribbean, but put less emphasis on the economic aspect of the issue than did Clarkson’s essays (Drescher 565–66). Why did Clarkson choose to be “sensitive” to the opposition’s claims? Why should the Abolition Society decide to focus on the humanitarian question? Drescher argued that “Clarkson’s own passage from morality to policy is subject to the usual reservations about all such putatively ‘representative’ writers” (Drescher 565). As for members of the Abolition Society, they believed “Britons should be ruled by moral sensibilities and British subjects should be deterred from further blood-guilt” (Drescher 574–75).6 Whatever the abolitionists’ intentions were, as a result of these arguments, more than five hundred localities in England and Scotland responded by formulating their appeals to Parliament. These petitions relied heavily on humanitarian reasons (Drescher 562). The antislavery debate rested largely on moral grounds, and Evangelical philanthropists became active in the abolitionist cause. The Evangelicals considered the abolition of slavery as the duty of the true Christian.7 Their emphasis on individual salvation and un worthiness of humans clashed with the Whig’s quest for esteem and honor. In 1805 William Wilberforce, an outstanding Evangelical, wrote: “Honor is, in fact, the God of idolatry; and where the character is formed on this basis, there is too general a deep and real, though, perhaps, a disguised contempt for that lowliness of which our blessed Saviour exhibited so bright a specimen, and which the Apostles so strongly enforce on all his followers” (Kriegel 428–29). The pursuit of honor and esteem was viewed by the Evangelicals as a worldly aspiration, and therefore selfish, but both groups collaborated toward the antislavery legislation bill. By appealing to liberty, both Whigs and Evangelicals were able to come to an agreement about slavery. The Whigs considered themselves as the party of liberty and subscribed to change. The difference between the Whigs and the Evangelicals resided in how each group

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defined liberty. For Evangelicals, liberty meant the salvation of the souls of the slaves, whereas the Whigs saw liberty as a prerequisite for the subordination of the emancipated. In other words, the Whigs believed slaves were incapable of “dignified obedience” and had to be uplifted to that level. Liberty, in this regard, meant the “individual’s willing acceptance of a hierarchical social order presided over by generous men of rank and honour” (Kriegel 440–50). To the Whigs, abolition was an improvement of the human condition rather than the “salvation of souls.” Because the Whigs identified themselves as the party of liberty, Evangelical James Stephen appealed to them to join hands with the Evangelicals in the emancipation struggle, with Evangelicals “awaiting the judgment of God, [and] the Whigs that of posterity,” the bill was passed in 1833 (Kriegel 450). Whatever their differences, both Evangelicals and Whigs agreed on one thing: that abolition would transform slaves into obedient and cheerful laborers whose needs would be met by working for their exmasters. It is worth noting that some abolitionists were aristocrats whose power depended on the maintenance of the status quo (Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony” 800). As members of the landed elite, abolition would not appear to serve their interests. But changes in the social structure help explain this contradiction. With the increase in industrialization, Blacks in England become more isolated because the paternal protection that aristocratic households offered them as a route to assimilation gave way to a laissezfaire attitude. In this new society of individual liberty and selfadvancement, slavery became the symbol of the forces that inhibited self-assertion (Lorimer 31–32). The aristocrats were already losing power to the nouveaux riches as a result of industrialization (because land became less valuable). Therefore they decided to fight for abolition since the ex-slave would eventually need their protection and patronage for economic survival: the slave master (aristocrat) hoped to become the boss, since the ex-slave, without assets, was to become his servant (sharecropper). But emancipation transformed the newly freed slaves into wage-laborers who now worked under the patronage of the nouveaux riches. Thus the antislavery struggle began to take on economic and social dimensions depending largely on the emergence of capitalism. David Davis makes a connection between capitalism and abolitionism when he notes how capitalism forced the rising bourgeois middle class to attack slavery because abolition would upset the social

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hierarchical order to their advantage (Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony” 802). His assertion implies that by attacking slavery, the members of the middle class could further diminish the power of the landed elite—power which depended on slave labor and which had begun to decline with industrialization. John Ashworth makes a similar connection between capitalism and the rise of humanitarian movements that opposed slavery. Capitalism, he argues, is a “general commodity production,” which includes not only markets but also wage labor and a class of wage-laborers. When wage labor emerged in the Industrial Revolution, it spurred the pursuit of self-interest. But self-interest was socially threatening because the wage-laborer lacked the incentive to uphold the classical notion that citizens should place community interests above the personal. The wage-laborer was likely to “sell out the nation for gain” in winning the economic race (Ashworth 821–22). For the wage-laborer, family and home became the source of support for “morality and social order” in a changing society. And if the family was a source of support, the slaves had no support because the slave had no “home” and was not like the wage-laborer in regard to freedom. In this scheme of things, slavery began to appear as a more hideous institution because it did not offer the independence of the wage-laborer (Ashworth 821–22). It can be argued that slavery began to be considered more hideous because of concerns connected with industrialization in general, and the system of wage labor in particular. It is not surprising that humanitarian movements began to be born, and a group of influential individuals joined the fight against slavery. While abolitionists rejected slavery, they also downplayed the lot of the working class, since abolition did not improve the conditions of the wage-laborer in England, but rather worsened it because the newly freed slaves and the wage-laborer had to compete with one another in the job market. As the antislavery debates became more heated, problems at home continued to threaten the nation. If the importation of slaves were to continue indefinitely, how was the nation going to take care of these unwanted Africans dying of cold and hunger in the streets of London? It was then in the nation’s best interest to put an end to the trade, find means to accommodate the already existing Blacks, and look for solutions to the unemployment that started to gnaw at the nation since “man-power” was being replaced with machines. Blacks living in England were to be repatriated to Africa.

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In 1786 abolitionists including Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, Henry Thornton, and a member of the British Parliament, William Wilberforce, founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. They also formed the aforementioned Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, and took up a proposed plan drawn by a botanist, Dr. Henry Smeathman. The latter had visited Sierra Leone and had proposed an agricultural settlement for London’s poor Blacks and Whites. On April 8, 1787, under the auspices of Captain T. Bouldon Thompson, 411 immigrants left for Sierra Leone. The settlers arrived on May 10, and after negotiating for land with King Tom of the Sierra Leone Peninsula, the immigrants were given two hundred square miles of coastal land (where they erected the British flag) in exchange for about fifty-nine British pounds worth of goods such as beads, iron bars, tobacco, and rum. Unfortunately problems began to besiege the settlers: eighty-six of them died four months after they arrived in Sierra Leone, and the same number had died earlier during the voyage to the colony. Malaria and dysentery claimed the lives of some; the remaining began to starve, knowing nothing about tropical agriculture. Moreover, English seeds could not adapt to the climate in the colony. Ensuing these problems, some of the settlers began to trade their belongings for food with the neighboring ethnic groups and later began to work on slave ships and for European slave traders! (Alie 50–53) The abolitionists appealed without success to the British government for financial assistance to revitalize the Sierra Leone settlement. In 1790 they formed the St. George’s Bay Company, chartered as the Sierra Leone Company the following year. Henry Thornton, a banker, became its chairman. The company’s objective was to eradicate slavery in the colony and to promote Christianity, commerce, and Western civilization. From 1796 the British government started making annual contributions to the company, and by 1798 this amount rose to ten thousand pounds per year. Interestingly enough, the same year, Britain set up a naval base intended to secure her shipping activities in West Africa. The British took total control of the colony and transformed it into a Crown Colony in 1808 (Alie 54–63). The Sierra Leone experience should be seen as a test case on the part of the British to formally colonize Africa, because the settlers (among whom were few Whites) were to promote, and be ruled by, English culture and laws. As early as 1792, 1200 Nova Scotian Blacks who had fought for the British in the American War of Independence,

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asked to be repatriated to Sierra Leone where they hoped to have access to land that was promised them for fighting on the British side. And, in 1796, 550 Jamaica Maroons—who had revolted against their enslavement by the British and had been deported to Nova Scotia— requested and obtained their transfer to Sierra Leone in hopes of building a better life in the Crown Colony (Alie 55–61). It is not surprising, then, that in 1884, at the partition of Africa in Berlin, Sierra Leone officially became a British colony. Hence, colonization schemes began to be drawn (now that the repatriation endeavors were in the hands of the British Crown) even before the emancipation bill was passed. As Eric Williams argues in his Capitalism and Slavery, abolition and the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for the freed slaves were not purely altruistic, but were motivated by economic and social imperatives. Williams contends that, although the humanitarianism of the abolitionists was unquestionable, Britain could not have passed the emancipation bill if it had not lost its slave-owning territory, the United States, due to the American War of Independence, or if the slave trade had not produced the necessary capital for British industrial takeoff (Williams 179). It is no coincidence, then, that about fifty years after slavery had been abolished in the British colonies, the Berlin Conference made it possible for European countries to occupy land in Africa on a so-called legal basis. The subjugation of Africans at the end of the nineteenth century by European nations should therefore be seen as a logical development of the latter’s previous activities —the trade in humans. Thus, colonization and its practices further reinforced the negative image of Africa already established, in large, by the Atlantic Slave Trade. COLONIZATION AND THE IMAGE OF AFRICA [T]he white savages of Europe are overrunning the dark savages everywhere the European nations are vying with one another in political burglaries. [Europe has] entered upon an era of social cannibalism in which the stronger nations are devouring the weaker. —Herbert Spencer (quoted in Pieterse 120–21)

Britain’s involvement in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, which I

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call the “return,” needed justification. We are led to conclude from the above discussions that colonization came as part of the abolition program. The abolition program entailed further involvement in Africa, and the Sierra Leone venture was the start. Slavery was deemed morally wrong and economically deficient, so the British, this time, had to use different tactics to justify their “concern” for Africans. The gospel (according to the British) and pseudo-scientific doctrines were major components of this strategy. When we look at the early Victorian explorers, we notice they were frequently missionaries. In 1857 David Livingstone, one of the pioneers in this domain, published Missionary Travels and took the Victorian reading public by storm. The account of these missionaries and explorers raised British interest to a new level. Even Dickens who disliked “evangelical types” exempted Livingstone when he said the latter had carried “into desert places the water of life” (Brantlinger 186–95). Livingstone thought commerce and Christianity were the only means to “civilize” Africans, since slavery continued after its abolition in England. Major Victorian scholars and writers also subscribed to this type of reasoning, among them Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. These Victorian writers’ views on slavery, its abolition, the emancipation of the slaves, and the colonization of Africa are of crucial importance because their writings reflected and shaped public opinion, and sometimes they influenced parliamentary decisions vis-à-vis the colonies. In his essay “The Niger Expedition,” Charles Dickens tells of the initiative taken by Great Britain to urge African chiefs along the coast of West Africa to end the slave trade and, consequently, to introduce “among these pagans the true doctrine of Christianity.” Obi Osai, a local chief, did not keep his promise to substitute the slave trade with commerce in commodities such as ivory, cotton and indigo for cloth, cowries, and beads (Dickens 46), an indication that Africans (or their chiefs) were to be held responsible for the continuation of the trade. We are led to conclude that, because they were heathens, savages, and uncivilized, these chiefs and their collaborators were unaware of the degradation of their own people (caused by the trade), and that Christianity would ultimately “civilize” and lead them toward abolition. The problem with this interpretation is that it disregards the fact that the trade could only be eradicated if and when those who owned the slave ships decided to stop the traffic. In his novel Bleak House, Dickens, perhaps unconsciously, summarizes the motives of the English philanthropists of the century. In this novel, Mrs. Jellyby’s interest in

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Africa is threefold: the “cultivation of coffee berry—and the natives— and the happy settlement, on the banks of African rivers, of our superabundant home population” (Dickens, Bleak House 82). In fact the superabundant home population, I would argue, includes the homeless and poor Blacks in England. The cultivation of coffee, which is a cash crop, is definitely not for the benefit of the Africans, and the “cultivation” of “the natives” reinforces the assumption that Africans needed European civilization and culture to make them human. It therefore becomes difficult to think that this program, to which Mrs. Jellyby (and by extension English philanthropists) is devoted to the point of ignoring her parenting responsibilities, is purely altruistic. Thomas Carlyle, a prominent author and critic, preceded Dickens in expressing similar views, particularly in his essay “The Nigger Question” (1849).8 Carlyle wrote his essay at a time when British plantation owners in the West Indies faced problems as abolitionists secured the end of British participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807 and the emancipation bill in 1833. The newly freed slaves either demanded higher wages or bought their own small farms. As a result the cost of sugar in the West Indies climbed, and the British labor system was in chaos: the Chartists threatened violence if their demands were not met. Both Carlyle and Dickens ridiculed Evangelical Christianity and philanthropy, given the problems affecting the national economy due to the abolition of slave labor. In “The Nigger Question,” Carlyle’s contempt for Africans is illustrated by a character of the author’s imagination, Quashee, who embodies all the stereotypical characteristics of the lazy, indolent, pumpkin-eating African. Carlyle believed that it would be total folly to emancipate “the West Indies into a Black Ireland; free indeed, but an Ireland, and Black!” (August 7). He maintained: I have come to the sad conclusion that SLAVERY, whether established by law, or law abrogated, exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and in fact, that you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but only can abolish the name of it, which is very little. If the Wisest Man were at the top of society, and the next-wisest next, and so on till we reached the Demerara Nigger (from whom downwards, through the horses, etc., there is no question hitherto), then were this a perfect world, the extreme maximum of wisdom produced in it. (August 14–15)

It is clear that Carlyle adhered to the theory of the “chain of being” in

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vogue at that time. Besides Mill’s response to Carlyle, another anonymous essay appeared in the December 8, 1849, issue of TheInquirer. In this essay, “Mr. Carlyle on the Negroes,” the author outlined certain facts that are worthy of attention: Mr. Carlyle might, at this day, have been a naked Pict, disputing with swine for acorns, and showing even less of a higher nature than Quashee squatting on a Jamaican waste, but for the inheritance of arts, and laws, and literature, which his forefathers derived from the Romans. The Northern barbarians received the impulse from Rome; Rome from the Etruscans and the Greeks; the Greeks from Egyptians or the Phoenicians. In the earliest antiquity there were dark-skinned Africans amongst those “dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns.” (August 55)

The author of the above quotation highlights the impact Carlyle’s essay could have on “race” relations not only in England but also the United States, by adding that in the United States “whatever precedes from Carlyle’s pen is read with avidity” (August 55). The image of Africans as barbarian, uncivilized, and pagan is as old as the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation slavery in the New World. The pervasiveness of these stereotypes during the Victorian period was intended to justify England’s “return” to the continent through imperialist ideologies. Patrick Brantlinger, in his essay “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent,” argues that great Victorian explorers such as David Livingstone and Henry Stanley, along with the evolutionary doctrines of Darwin, helped fortify what became known as the “myth of the Dark Continent” (Brantlinger 186). Historian Philip Curtin asserts that the popular image of Africa was clearly established by the 1850s: “It was found in children’s books, in Sunday school tracts, in the popular press. Its major affirmations were the ‘common knowledge’ of the educated classes. Thereafter, when new generations of explorers or administrators went to Africa, they went with a prior impression of what they would find” (Curtin xxi). According to Oliver and Page, the notion of Africa as the Dark Continent is a narrow European idea which became popular “because Africa was the last continent to be open to the gaze of the outside world…” and because the Africans had already made enough progress in earlier centuries to resist the modern age for such a long time (13–14). In an editorial foreword to A Short History of Africa, Ronald Segal points out:

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While the centers of European culture flourished, decayed, and sprouted in turn empires in Africa rose, ruled, resisted, and succumbed. Scholars studied and disputed in Timbuctu as in Paris, and what the Italians accomplished with pigment, the artists of Benin achieved in bronze. The cultures were different, but only on the horizontal. The vertical, the separation into superior and inferior, was a product of conquest. (Oliver and Page 10)

While it is true that conquest prompted by socio-economic conditions in England contributed largely to the negative image of Africa, one must hasten to add that pseudoscientific doctrines and race theories were also crucial factors. RACE AND PSEUDOSCIENCE Theories about race began to gather momentum during the Victorian era to explain the so-called inferiority of the nonwhite. Race classifications were in vogue as early as the first half of the eighteenth century when, in 1738, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus assigned all mankind to the species Homo sapiens (“Wise Man”). Linnaeus then divided the human species into the following varieties: The Americanus (American Indian) he characterized as tenacious, contented, free, and ruled by custom; the Europaeus (European) is alleged to be light, inventive, and ruled by rites; the Asiaticus (Asian) is described as stern, haughty, stingy, and ruled by opinion. Finally, he characterized the Afer (African) as cunning, slow, negligent, and ruled by caprice (Dunn and Dobzhansky 109). It is evident that he based this classification on continent of origin and on alleged mental capabilities. The problem with this classification is that slow, stingy, and contented people can also be found in that part of the world inhabited by the Europaeus. In other words, this classification is biased and self-serving. In 1775 a German scholar and founder of anthropology, Otto Blumenbach, chose to divide the human species into five varieties according to skin color; to each variety he gave the name race: Caucasian or White; Mongolian or yellow; Ethiopian or Black; American or red; Malayan or brown (Dunn and Dobzhansky 110). Although Blumenbach did not base his classification on intellectual faculty, when we combine the two (Linnaeus’s and Blumenbach’s) it becomes easy to attribute to the White race superior mental faculties and inferior ones to Blacks. Consequently, the empire builders of Victorian England relegated Black or darker people to an inferior status, and thereby,

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were able to justify their “civilizing” mission. These race classifications remained dormant until the mid-nineteenth century when the British began their colonization schemes. Brantlinger points out that between 1790 and 1840 major writing about Africa was antislavery propaganda. The image of the African then was the romanticized “noble savage.” For example, in his poem “The Slave Trade Abolished” James Grahame writes: In that fair land of hill, and dale, and stream, The simple tribes from age to age had heard No hostile voice…(quoted in Brantlinger 189)

But that Utopian image predates the introduction of traits of “civilization”: avarice, treachery, murder, warfare, and slavery (Brantlinger 189). Marlow, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, tells us that Africa is “not a blank space any more. It had become a place of darkness” (Conrad 71). Brantlinger capitalizes on Marlow’s remark to point out that Africa had become dark because “Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light [that] was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of savage customs in the name of civilization” (Brantlinger 173). According to Michael Banton and Jonathan Harwood, the science of race climaxed during the mid-nineteenth century when a variety of classifications emerged and raised questions as to motives. Since a classification is a tool, they argue, it would be difficult to assert the appropriateness or validity of any classification, not to mention that of race, unless we know what is to be done with it (Goldberg 64). Lucius Outlaw, in his article “Toward a Critical Theory of Race,” argues that race can be defined partly geographically, partly culturally, and partly politically (Goldberg 1990:68). In a word race is a trope, a social formation, used by Victorians to justify their overt “civilizing” mission. The covert mission is summarized in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (99). The stereotypes associated with Africans and the justification of England’s presence in Africa continued to be enforced not only by the early explorers, pseudoscientific doctrines, and selfserving theories, but also by various writers of popular literature, among them the famous boys’ writer George Henty. George Henty was among the most influential Victorian juvenile authors, a writer

AFRICA AND EUROPE 21

who was highly selective and deliberate about the images of society that he presented to the young. In one of Henty’s African novels, By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War (1884), an English naturalist, Mr. Goodenough, “instructs” Frank (the hero) with a pseudoscientific description of West African peoples: They are always laughing or quarreling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old…. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed…. Living among whites their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery. (117–18)

Henty’s comments on the West African personality (that is, according to him, West Africans are the most indolent of all Africans), raise the question about the role of stereotypes. In other words, why do we create stereotypes? Quoting Jack Levin, Sander Gilman argues in his Difference and Pathology (1985) that we cannot function in the world without stereotypes because “they perpetuate a needed sense of difference between the ‘self and the ‘object,’ which becomes the ‘Other’ (18). Gilman opines that stereotypes are necessary because their creation is a “concomitant of the process by which all human beings become individuals” (17). Our sense of self and the world begins during infancy when the self is “split” into a “good” self and a “bad” self, between the “good” and “bad” object. Given that there is no real rupture between the “bad” self and the “good” self, his argument continues, an imaginary line must be drawn in order for the self to be able to cope with the “contradictions present in the necessary integration of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ aspects of the self (17). However, herein lie the origins of stereotypes. In stereotyping, we project our anxieties, our loss of control of the object, onto the “bad” self, which, “with its repressed sadistic impulses, becomes the ‘bad’ Other, and the ‘good’ self/object becomes the antithesis to the flawed image of the self, the self out of control” (20). In short, stereotypes attest to our inability or failure to deal honestly with ourselves (the “bad” self), in that the “bad” Other is essentially a projection of the “bad” self. Gilman distinguishes between pathological and nonpathological stereotyping. While the latter gives us an ephemeral control of our environment and is discarded when anxiety is surmounted, the patho-

22 NARRATING AFRICA

logical personality lacks the ability to distinguish the individual from the stereotyped group or class, and therefore maintains a rigid line of difference found in the stereotype (18). Following this line of thought, the stereotypes one finds in Henty’s works should be viewed (at least today) not only as pathological, but also as contagious because they have not been discarded after their immediate use in justifying European domination of Africa. In other words, the persistence and reshaping of nineteenth-century racial stereotypes on the eve of the twentiethfirst century attest to the pathological and contagious nature of stereotypes. Because Henty maintains this rigid line between the self and the Other in his writings, a critical reading of his juvenile novels should reveal more about the “bad” self (British), masked as the “bad” Other (Africans), since it would be naive to assume that the self is endowed exclusively with the “good,” and the Other the “bad.” As a pedagogical tool, juvenile literature in European history reflected the values, attitudes, and fantasies of the adult world. The following chapter discusses the advent of juvenile literature, its development, and its role in the building of the British empire. I shall discuss specific works of writers who predate Henty to show how the development of nineteenth-century juvenile literature was concomitant with the imperialist mission. NOTES 1. There is a linkage here between this European manipulation of the scene during the Atlantic Slave Trade and what became known in 1993 as Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. European countries had previously sold arms to Somalia prior to the civil war; in the wake of political and ideological disagreements that could have been settled amiably, factional groups resorted to the arms they had been encouraged by the manufacturers to purchase for national defense purposes. After much damage has been done and much ammunition has been sold, “humanitarians” from Europe and the United States went into Somalia to disarm the people they had armed to the teeth in the previous years, and we all praise their humanitarian objectives! This point is not to stipulate that the availability of arms justifies the civil war in Somalia, but to call to mind the continuing Western interference and manipulation of the African scene. 2. Christianity did not originate in Europe, but was appropriated by

AFRICA AND EUROPE 23

Europe since all the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) originated in what is known today as the Middle East. In fact Christianity was introduced into Ethiopia as early as the fourth century, prior to its advent in Europe (Ullendorff 11). 3. As historian Michael Craton notes, “[c]ertain facts are inescapable. Slavery was the basis of the most valued part of British mercantilist empire which, in a latter era and under a different covenant, came to cover 30 percent of the world’s land area. British slavery by any account has had a decided, if indirect, influence on a large portion of the modern world” (xxi). Therefore, British policymakers thought that the abolition of slavery was “incoherent with the Interest and Policy of Great Britain, that from the Silence of the Planters it may be concluded, they place such Confidence in the Wisdom of the British Senate as renders any serious Opposition unnecessary” (quoted in Craton xxi). 4. The concerns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not confined to the living conditions of the free, poor, Black population, but included the English working class. The deplorable plight of this class is reflected in this anonymous poem of the era, “Two Weavers.” Ironically, in this poem, the English working class is in worse shape than the African slave: “Now these are a few o’ the ills which I think, Have driven auld Britain to misery’s brink, And made her free sons, once intrepid and brave, To envy the lot o’ the African slave; Poor Britain! how sadly thy glories decline….” 5. In 1771 James Somerset, who was brought from Virginia to England, deserted his master. He was arrested and taken to court. Although Sharp never appeared in court, he urged Somerset to reject any compromise offer of manumission, since English laws prohibited slavery on English soil. The decision of the court set Somerset free and granted freedom to any slave brought to England. 6. Ironically, although Clarkson and the Abolition Society thought slavery was morally wrong, they also emphasized that its elimination would damage England’s economy. The sugar cane planta-

24 NARRATING AFRICA

tions in the West Indies were deemed crucial to economic wellbeing at home (Drescher 562). 7. Since the reign of King Henry VIII (1509–1547), the Church of England had been the official established church of the nation until 1830 when it underwent reforms. These reforms include the admission of Dissenters (nonconformist churches or sects) and Roman Catholics to Parliament. Besides, reforms in Parliament led the latter to legislate for the church, and the Anglican Church lost its role in national politics. As a result of these divisions within the church and as an antidote to the growing religious indifference of the masses, a religious revival occurred: Evangelicalism began to take shape (Altholz, Victorian England 1837–1901 155). 8. In December of 1849, an anonymously authored essay appeared in Fraser’s Magazine entitled “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Because of the racist content of the article, it was condemned by many, including John Stuart Mill, who knew that Carlyle was the author of the offensive essay. Mill responded to this article, also published anonymously, in the next issue of Fraser’s Magazine and entitled it “The Negro Question.” Carlyle expanded on his original article and published it in pamphlet form with a more offensive title, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” which he later called “The Nigger Question.” Carlyle’s essay is an example of Victorian writing that helped perpetuate the myth of Black inferiority, and consequently shaped modern attitudes toward Africans and their descendants.

CHAPTER 2

Pre-Henty Juvenile Novels and the British Empire

It is now recognized that juvenile literature acts as an excellent reflector of the dominant ideas of an age. The values and fantasies of adult authors are dressed up in fictional garb for youthful consumption, and the works thereby become instrumental in the dissemination and perpetuation of particular clusters of ideals, assumptions and ambitions. —John MacKenzie, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature

Popular fiction is one of the ways by which society instructs its members in its prevailing ideas and mores, its dominant role models and legitimate aspirations. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. So it can act—sometimes simultaneously—as a form of social control, directing the popular will towards certain viewpoints and attributes deemed desirable by those controlling the production of popular fiction, and as a mirror of widely-held popular views. —Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature

Today the popularity of children’s literature obfuscates the fact that concepts of childhood and literature for children are relatively recent. Throughout Western Europe, the beginning of the seventeenth century brought a new understanding of the notion of childhood, thereby creat25

26 NARRATING AFRICA

ing new cultural institutions (for example, the school system) and new classes of readers (children and young adults). Until then children had been considered as adults in miniature, having few special needs and interests. Toys and dress, previously shared by both adults and children, became the child’s after they had been simplified and altered. In England literature specifically directed toward children and young adults was hardly written until the end of the eighteenth century. Its advent was occasioned by the Evangelicals’ concern to purify and pacify the youth of an urban and industrialized society through religious teachings. Moralists and pedagogues within the church began to nurture the idea that not only were children different from adults, but also innocent; they should be isolated from the corrupt and corrupting circle of adults. Thus children were to be safeguarded, protected, and educated through books deemed appropriate to their special pedagogic requirements. This new perception of the child provided the framework for children’s literature1 which began to flourish at breathtaking speed, coinciding with the period of British notions of empire-building during the second half of the nineteenth century. This rapid growth was magnified by advances made in printing technology and the spread of educational opportunities (Shavit 3–7). By the end of the nineteenth century, literature for the young had taken on new dimensions and directions. While not confined to empire-building, juvenile literature became one of the vehicles for the dissemination and inculcation of imperialist concepts and ideologies— a far cry from its original purpose. John Mackenzie’s argument in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature—that juvenile literature is reflective of the adult society that produces it—establishes a connection between the content of juvenile literature and the practice of empirebuilding. Juvenile literature offered a site for the “dissemination of particular clusters of ideas, assumptions, and ambitions” of the Victorian people, for example, the extension of the British empire at the expense of Africa and other nonindustrialized nations. Jeffrey Richards argues in his introduction to Imperialism and Juvenile Literature that between 1850 and 1950 imperialism became the “dominant ideology,” transcending class and party divisions: Britain was saturated in the ethos and attitudes of empire. They infused plays and books and, later, films. They informed school textbooks. They inspired paintings, prints and engravings. They filled newspapers and magazines. They figured in advertisements and packaging. The

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impact was arguably greater than that of any previous dominant ideology because its pre-eminence coincided with the rise of the mass market and mass media. (Richards 2)

Consciously or unconsciously, this ideology was inescapable in that it permeated Victorian society in all walks of life. But how did this come about? This chapter sets out to explore the various connections among literature for young readers in Victorian England, the public school system, and British imperialism. In other words, I shall examine the role of nineteenth-century juvenile literature and public institutions in perpetuating racial myths and ideologies which advanced the British imperialist cause. Our specific frame of reference will be Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready, W.H.G. Kingston’s In the Wilds of Africa, and R.M.Ballantyne’s Black Ivory. Since its advent, juvenile literature had essentially been didactic, although it also had a role as entertainment. In Boys Will Be Girls, Claudia Nelson asserts that although “entertainment may have formed the limbs” of juvenile literature, “didacticism remained its backbone” (1). In 1788 Mrs. Trimmer published Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals. This book, dedicated to Princess Sophia, was described in its introduction as “a series of fables.” It stressed moral and Christian values suitable for children. Between 1792 and 1796, Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Aiken wrote and published Evenings at Home or The Juvenile Budget Opened, subtitled “Consisting of a Variety of Miscellaneous Pieces for the Instruction of Young Persons.” Like Fabulous Histories, Evenings at Home contains a mixture of stories, moral and religious teachings, and facts. Maria Edgeworth’s The Parents’ Assistant or Stories for Children appeared in 1796, and Mrs. Sherwood published her History of the Fairchild Family in 1818. All these nursery classics have one main objective: to protect, discipline, and teach good manners and morals (Musgrave 21–23). By midcentury, it became evident that these nursery classics no longer met the needs of a juvenile audience, as imperialism was becoming the order of the day. Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby, wrote in 1842: “Childishness in boys, even of good abilities, seems to be a growing fault, and I do not know to what to ascribe it, except to the greater number of exciting books of amusement like Pickwick or Nickleby” (quoted in Musgrave 24). Arnold’s observation alludes to

28 NARRATING AFRICA

juvenile literature as a distinct genre of entertainment—an evolving nineteenth-century concept. Although Defoe had already published Robinson Crusoe (1719), it was not intended for children or young adults. William Bryce argued in his Half-Hours with Famous Writers for Boys, that Defoe did not write Robinson Crusoe for boys of eight to fifteen, nor did he write it for the young man of twenty-one. Defoe was a middle-aged man, Bryce asserted, and he wrote the novel for middle-aged men like himself (Bryce 5). While this may be true, the novel became and remains a boys’ novel, and as we shall see, Robinson Crusoe became the model for the adventure story during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1857 Thomas Hughes published his classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and revitalized the school story that aimed at moral maturity (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 174). While Hughes concerned himself with boyhood and manhood in school and at home, late nineteenth-century writers concentrated on boyhood and manhood in exotic settings. When Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the English were beginning to dominate the seas, adventure was in vogue, and the Atlantic Slave Trade was in full swing. By 1840 England had already abolished the slave trade in its territories, and colonization schemes were beginning to emerge. Arnold’s complaint— that “childishness in boys seems to be a growing fault” in juvenile literature—coincided with revival and adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, a story that embodied the spirit of adventure, conquest, and empire. With the advent of the late-nineteenth-century adventure story,2 juvenile literature which had once catered to both boys and girls became essentially boys’ literature (Musgrave 45). In the second half of the century the fictional adventure tale coexisted with the school story in works by writers such as Ballantyne, Marryat, Kingston, and Henty (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 174). Defoe’s adventure tale, Robinson Crusoe, and Hughes’s school story Tom Brown’s Schooldays can serve as our frame of reference when we critique the works of these writers of empire, not because Robinson Crusoe was the very first English adventure novel (although it has been considered such), or Tom Brown’s Schooldays the first school story, but because both works had an unprecedented impact on the writers under discussion in this chapter. When Robinson Crusoe first appeared,3 it had an instant and enduring appeal, and was soon translated into many languages. JeanJacques Rousseau in Emile (1762) deemed it essential for growing

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boys. Karl Marx in Das Capital (1867) used it to explicate economic theory (Drabble 836). In addition to their Bibles, missionaries took copies of Robinson Crusoe with them to the colonies (Martin Burgess Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 212). Robinson Crusoe became everyone’s “bible,” whether they were economic theorists, missionaries, education theorists, or of course, writers of empire. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Hughes advocated what became known as “muscular Christianity”—a combination of Christian values, physical courage, self-reliance, school loyalty, love of sport, and patriotism— which altered the public school ethos. Hence, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays one can see the seeds of Kingston’s, Marryat’s, and Ballantyne’s evangelicalism and patriotism—values that gave way to Henty’s aggressive militarism later in the century. Robinson Crusoe is clearly an eighteenth-century novel, but crucial to our understanding of the nineteenth-century adventure novel. Like most adventure novels, Defoe’s is a romance, but when put into a historical perspective it reveals images and messages of interest to the study of imperialism. What is adventure? How does it relate to British notions of empire? The Random House College Dictionary defines it as an undertaking that involves risk, an “unforeseeable danger.” This definition suggests that the survivor would have to use wit, leadership, endurance, and survival skills in order to overcome the dangers associated with adventure. In Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, Martin Green relates the role of adventure stories in the age of imperialism: the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism. They were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night; and in the form of its dreams, they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule. (3)

While acknowledging that “the Robinson Crusoe story, and the adventure story as a whole, has been racist,” Green also maintains that, unlike “most adventures [which] carry signs of anti-imperialism as a way to enlist readers’ sympathy,” Robinson Crusoe is among the few that “carry anti-imperialist signs that are as convincing….” In The Robinson Crusoe Story, Green describes Robinson Crusoe as an “antiimperialist story, on the side of self-help, not hierarchy, of the adventurous individual, not of official authority” (15–23). Green’s reading only tells part of the story, and I intend to argue that Robinson Crusoe

30 NARRATING AFRICA

is anything but anti-imperialist inasmuch as it contains the seeds of the fiction of empire: racial hierarchy, material acquisitiveness, and allegedly cannibalistic natives. DEFOE AND THE ADVENTURE NOVEL: ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719) Here de white man beat de Black man Till he’s sick and cannot stand. Sure the black man [will] be eat[en] by white man! Will not go to white man land.4

Born in London in 1660, Defoe attended Morton’s academy for Dissenters with hopes of becoming a minister. But after his marriage he became instead a hosiery merchant and failed terribly at trade ventures. Becoming heavily indebted, he took to writing pamphlets5 (An Essay Upon Projects in 1697 and The Shortest Way with Dissenters in 1702, a pamphlet for which he was fined, imprisoned, and pilloried). In this pamphlet, Defoe, a Dissenter himself, ironically called for a “total and savage suppression of dissent.” Defoe later produced about 560 books, pamphlets and journals, wrote for and edited The Review from 1704 to 1713 (Drabble 262), and was “engaged in political propaganda and semipolitical intrigue” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 68). Defoe was the government agent sent to Edinburgh to mediate the Union of England and Scotland. This union, Defoe thought, was not only an extension of the empire, but also produced an improvement of Scottish life, albeit it faced strong Scottish opposition (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 68). Despite his versatility, Defoe’s most popular work has remained Robinson Crusoe. The narrative is partly based on Alexander Selkirk’s story6 with which Defoe was probably familiar. Robinson Crusoe is a story of a man who defies his parents and goes to sea only to be cast away on an unidentified island between Brazil and the coast of Guinea where he gradually learns to survive by accumulating goods and growing crops; ultimately he becomes the “king” of the island. After fifteen lonely years, Crusoe finds human footprints, and later human bones, that alert him to possible cannibalism on the island. When the cannibals come back, Crusoe saves one of their victims, names him Friday,

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and gives him the role of the submissive and faithful slave. Crusoe undertakes to teach Friday English and to convert him to Christianity. The next time the “savages” return to the island, their victims include a Spanish sea captain and Friday’s father, whom Crusoe and Friday rescue. The captain offers to take Crusoe and Friday back to England where a fortune awaits Crusoe. Crusoe sells his sugarcane plantation in Brazil, gets married, and plans to revisit the island. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt provides us with a sociohistorical interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. He relates Crusoe’s acquisitiveness and pursuit of property to the rise of “economic individualism” of which Adam Smith and others before him have spoken (Watt 63–64). As discussed in the previous chapter, this rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie was the main determining factor in the quest for adventure and conquest of the “blank spaces” of the globe. From such a perspective, Robinson Crusoe is more than just a romance. The novel reflects the socio-economic trends of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Crusoe’s pursuit of money or wealth, Watts argues, is indicative of the “profit and loss book-keeping which Max Weber considered to be the distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism” (Watt 63). In fact, when Crusoe accepts money from a Spanish steward to alleviate his financial difficulties, he records the following in his notebook: “I could hardly refrain from tears while he spoke; in short I took 100 of the moidores, and called for a pen and ink to give him a receipt for them” (Defoe 316). In Guinea Crusoe realizes that he could purchase not only gold (which Defoe considered to be of an intrinsic value), elephant tusks, and “Guinea” grains, but also slaves for work on the plantations in Brazil. As Watt points out, the “hypostasis of economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling, and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality—all are weakened (Watt 64). The “devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling, and action,” the devaluation of Friday’s culture and belief system, is exemplified in the way Crusoe undertakes to erase Friday’s past (which apparently amounts to nothing but cannibalism) and to convert him. This erasure recalls the erasure and distortion of the history and culture of the colonized. The novel takes on cultural significance when we see Friday as the fictional rendition of the “noble savage”7 of the Enlightenment era. As such, Friday’s enslavement and the consequent killing of the indigenous people of the island are justified by their alleged cannibal-

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ism. Needless to say that it was this idea of the noble savage that partly kept the Atlantic Slave Trade alive throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and later fueled British notions of empire-building. The idea of the noble savage, closely related to the motif of cannibalism, deserves our attention. Since primitivism has been associated with a lost paradise, the subjugation of Africans and other nonWestern peoples (thought to be primitive) could not have been effectively articulated had Europe maintained the so-called nobility of the savage paradigm. The cannibalism motif counteracted this nobility and made slavery and colonization a justifiable and justified cause. As Jan Pieterse puts it, “cannibalism in a single shorthand icon represented the other side of paradise” (Pieterse 117). It is noteworthy that in antiquity and the Middle Ages, tales of “man-eating” people referred to Europe itself. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these narratives became known as tales of cannibalism through the corruption of the term Caribals, or the denizens of the Caribbean islands. Pieterse asserts that in the age of imperialism “Scottish missionaries, Bible in hand [turned] directly against the Romantic poets and their idyllic images of life in the tropics” by alleging that the indigenous people were cannibals (Pieterse 117). Hence Crusoe, armed with his Bible and gun, sets out to turn “cannibals” into “cornbread and cattleflesh eaters” (Defoe 200) because “if they [cannibals] were given the chance they would devour us [Europeans]…” (Pieterse 121). Crusoe’s survival, and his consequent enslavement of Friday, depend on his possession of a gun and tools of modern technology; he thus becomes the king of the island by subduing the alleged cannibals. It is with the sound of the gun that Crusoe announces his arrival on the island; it is also at the sight of the gun that Friday falls to his knees to worship Crusoe. It is the gun that keeps Crusoe alive and paves the way for Friday’s conversion: empire-building and conquest required not only the gun, but also, as we shall see, the Bible. Let’s recall that in 1719, when Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, notions of empire, conquest, and race had already begun to take shape in the consciousness of the British people. Hence, Friday abandons his “savage” ways as soon as he begins to associate himself with Crusoe. He becomes a Christian, an indication of his adoption of “civilized” ways—the only way, the British thought, Others could elevate themselves to humanity. Friday is a “native”; he is described thus:

PRE-HENTY 33

He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, with straight, strong limbs; not too large, tall and well-shaped…. He had the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his forehead very high and large…. The color of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly, yellow, nauseous tawny as the Brazilians and other natives of America are, but of a bright kind of a dun olive color, that had in it something very agreeable, although not easy to describe. His face was round and plump; his nose small, not flat like the negroes; a very good mouth, thin lips, and fine teeth well set, and white as ivory (Defoe 180).

Friday is the Other, a stereotype of what the Other is supposed to be. In Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, Daniel Bivona reminds us that the Other is also the Self. He argues that in a Nietzschean sense “the values one identifies with the ‘civilized’ are nothing more than those which have been appropriated as one’s own (Bivona 91). That Friday is Christianized does not surprise us since we are led to view his conversion as a blessing: although he now belongs to Crusoe, Friday has won, by his conversion, the “status” that enables him to serve and sacrifice his life for Crusoe. In Crusoe’s words, “I dare say he would have sacrificed his life for the saving of mine, upon any occasion whatsoever” (Defoe 183). Friday promises to convince his people to put an end to their cannibalism and take on the ways of the White man. Until he is “saved” by Crusoe, Friday has been a “savage,” a nameless cannibal about to be devoured by other savages; rescued by Crusoe, he becomes “my savage,” (Crusoe’s), and finally, Friday. Naming is associated with ownership and identity; thus, Friday’s humanity is called into question when he is objectified as a savage or as Crusoe’s slave. Renamed, he becomes a “civilized” person and Crusoe’s possession. Friday’s identity, his culture and beliefs, are thus easily undermined and dismissed in order for his enslavement to take place. In colonial discourse, it is at this point in time that Friday’s history or the history of his people begins: he becomes a Christian armed with a gun, and he participates in eliminating cannibalism on the island. What is interesting here is that Friday apparently has an idea of God, a Creator, who “lived beyond all…much older than the sea and the land.” Despite the indication that Friday and his people believe in a Supreme Being, Crusoe dismisses that fact and proceeds to indoctrinate him. It is obvious that Crusoe is not as interested in Friday’s con-

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version to the ways of the Lord as he is in his conversion to the ways of the British people. Otherwise, the question arises: what makes Crusoe’s God different from Friday’s? It is quite erroneous to think that the socalled animistic religions are not embedded in the notion of a Supreme Being, the concept of God. But like the uncorrupted noble savage, “the savage became a good Christian, a much better than I” (Defoe 196–97). And, when Friday expresses his desire to go back to his nation, Crusoe becomes apprehensive because the latter believes Friday might regress8 into savagery: “Friday, do not you wish yourself in your own country, your own nation? [as opposed to Crusoe’s kingdom on the island]?” “Yes,…I be much glad to be at my own nation.” “What would you do there?…Would you turn wild again, eat men’s flesh again, and be a savage as you were before?” “No, no; Friday tell them to live good; tell them to pray God; tell them to eat cornbread, cattleflesh, milk, no eat man again.” (Defoe 200)

Friday refuses to go back to his people unless he is accompanied by Crusoe, who is afraid of becoming a victim of cannibalism. But Friday assures him that there is nothing to be concerned about because “[y]ou [Crusoe] do great deal much good. You teach wild mans to be good, sober, tame mans; you tell them know God, pray God, and live new life” (203). Thus, Friday becomes a living proof of the wonders of British culture and civilization: he represents the British people’s ability to turn savages into humans, Christians, and “cornbread and cattleflesh” eaters—an example for Others to imitate. The island does not belong to Crusoe, whether or not its inhabitants are really cannibals. But the alleged cannibalism of its denizens compels Crusoe to claim the island by restoring law and order. Not only does Robinson Crusoe foreshadow imperialist tendencies, it can also be read as a proslavery document. After being rescued by Crusoe, and because he does not speak English, Friday, kneeling down before Crusoe, “kissed the ground, and laid his head upon it, then taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head. This, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave forever” (Defoe 178). Friday’s gestures, could have meant “I owe you my life” or “I thank you.” But since Crusoe never returns to this incident to clarify what Friday meant when he knelt down, the reader is left with Crusoe’s interpretation of Friday’s gestures: that Friday swears to be his slave for life—a defining characteristic of slavery. Friday’s inability to speak Crusoe’s language dur-

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ing their initial contact renders him voiceless and makes him vulnerable since Crusoe has to speak for him and interpret his gestures. Paradoxically, Friday’s acculturation, his ability to speak Crusoe’s language later in the novel, gives him no power, but instead enslaves him; in fact Friday is able to serve Crusoe more efficiently, to obey his orders—”dig” and “fetch.” Thus, Friday’s acculturation should be seen as a situation wherein Crusoe (the colonizer or enslaver) lets Friday (the colonized or slave) gain access to Crusoe’s culture (i.e. language, religion) in order to better serve him. Africans taken to the Americas and the Caribbean islands were meant to be slaves for life. Written at the height of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Robinson Crusoe endorsed the theory of noble savage and helped reinforce the plantation myth: the myth of the happy slave. Another illustration of this idea can be seen in Xury, also Crusoe’s slave. Although Crusoe is unwilling to sell Xury, the latter pleads to be sold, just as Friday vows to be Crusoe’s slave for life. Even if Crusoe were to have any misapprehensions about either enslaving or killing the natives, his Britishness would supposedly entitle him to make the island a habitable environment by eliminating cannibalism. He is unable to contain himself as he witnesses the “horrid spectacle”: “All my apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch of inhuman brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of human nature, which, though I had heard of often, yet I never had so near a view of before. In short, I turned away my face from the horrid spectacle” (Defoe 152). Robinson Crusoe is also a romance. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye notes three main stages of a romance: the journey, a crucial struggle, and an exaltation of the hero—stages that are identifiable in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. But Robinson Crusoe is also associated with empire, frontier, exploration—terms that connote a hero, a protagonist with whom the reader identifies. Young adults, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity, often identify with Crusoe, but when they become more aware of the tale’s cultural implications, the nonwhite juveniles tend to identify with Friday. This seems particularly true when I recall the first time I read this work. From our ongoing discussion, it is clear that even if Robinson Crusoe “carries antiimperialist signs,” as Green claims, these are far from being convincing. While Robinson Crusoe sets the tone for the English adventure novel and functions as a blueprint for conquest and colonization, Tom Brown’s Schooldays exemplifies the school story that teaches Chris-

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tian values and “manliness”—the necessary prerequisites for the “empire boys.” THE SCHOOL STORY: THOMAS HUGHES’S TOM BROWN’S SCHOOLDAYS (1856) Thomas Hughes was born in 1822, attended Thomas Arnold’s Rugby (1833–1842) where he became captain of the cricket and football teams, read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn and at Oxford, and later moved to Wimbledon where he and his wife shared a house with his Christian Socialist friend John Ludlow. At Wimbledon Hughes wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays (under the pseudonym An Old Friend) during his summer vacation of 1856. During the course of writing Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he lost his beloved daughter, Evie, to scarlet fever—an event that may have contributed to the changed tone in the second part of the novel written after Evie’s death. Although Hughes was interested in social reform, Tom Brown’s Schooldays was Hughes’s way of mentoring his eight-year-old son, Maurice, he was about to send to school: “Thinking over what I should like to say to him before he went to school, I took to writing a story, as the easiest way of bringing out what I wanted” (quoted in Musgrave 48–49). Besides fulfilling Hughes’s immediate aim, Tom Brown’s Schooldays speaks to changes and reforms in the educational system in Victorian England. In many societies, and for a long time, the family had been the only educational institution; but the advent of the school system gave birth to many societal changes. In Victorian England the switch to educate children largely outside the home occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century. Formal education, then, meant private, expensive preparatory and secondary schools, or schools provided by some charity and limited to the education of boys. Vivian Ogilvie defines the public school as an “aristocratic or plutocratic school which is wholly or almost wholly a Boarding School,…under some form of more or less public control,…‘non-local’…independent of the State and of local government (Ogilvie 7). Public schools at the turn of the century were marked by violence, immorality, and rebellions that had to be contained by the law enforcement officers (Musgrave 42). But Arnold transformed the public school into a community where the pupils were to be Christianized or reformed. From the 1830s, the demand for “public schools,” as these schools came to be known, increased in view of

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greater financial security and the willingness to educate boys. This demand for public schools can be partly attributed to reforms at Rugby, the English public school that gained respect under Thomas Arnold between 1828 and 1842. Among his reforms was “the assurance that the headmaster would have complete independence in all matters of school discipline and school routine”; he also endeavored to “make the school far more a corporate unit” that should be preserved and encouraged, and where ruthless pupils faced dismissal. The prefect system was also an Arnoldian “invention” which allowed some administrative matters to be handled by senior boys (Newsome 40– 41). Arnold was able to convince the Victorian people of the effectiveness of public schools in attaining high social status and a sound education (Musgrave 42). Although the reforms Thomas Hughes endorses in Tom Brown’s Schooldays are not exactly what Arnold had accomplished, Hughes’s work bears resemblance to the essential reforms Arnold brought to Rugby. In Happiest Days, Jeffrey Richards argues that the “transformation” we see in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, of an “ordinary, headstrong boy into a responsible, mature, committed adult, chivalrous, Christian and concerned,” is in “accordance with Arnold’s emphasis on instilling moral and religious principle and gentlemanly behavior” (Richards, Happiest Days 63). We should also note that in Tom Brown’s Schooldays athleticism is as important as intellectual development, but Tom, the protagonist, never reaches the intellectual stage, whereas Arnold emphasized intellectual development above all. John Raymond de Symons Honey, in his Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century, asserts that Arnold himself acknowledged the need for change at Rugby (46–47). The connection among Arnoldian reforms of the public school system, the British empire, and juvenile literature becomes pertinent given the fact that the “empire boys” were educated in these schools where their duty to empire was of prime importance and where life itself was becoming an adventure. Whatever the similarities between Arnold’s theory of public schools and Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the latter “recalls, records and mythifies the Rugby of Dr. Arnold, creating a selective image of Arnoldianism” (Richards, Happiest Days 24). But Hughes also incorporated into his work concepts that were crucial to him: the ideals of Christian Socialism, Carlyle’s idea of work and hero-worship, and English nationalism (Richards, 24). Jeffrey Richards notes:

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With the passing of time the religious element of the second half of the book, which was Hughes’s avowed object in writing it, was downgraded in favour of the games-playing and character formation of the first half, which were adduced in support of the later nineteenth-century cults of athleticism and imperialism. For Tom Brown is more than just a school story: it is a mirror of the changing nature and structure of Victorian values…. Arnold’s concept of “Godliness and Good Learning” is passed through the filter of Hughes’s commitment to muscular Christianity, and this in its turn feeds into the games mania and Empire worship of later decades. (Happiest Days 24)

This shift of emphasis, as Richards’ statement shows, is indicative of the changing values and preoccupations of the Victorian people in view of the receding religious faith. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is largely autobiographical, evoking Hughes’s days at Rugby under its renowned headmaster.9 It condemns the bullying that had hitherto prevailed in the public schools and celebrates family values, patriotism, physical courage, self-reliance, love of sport, and what became known as “muscular Christianity”10 (Drabble 481). As Michael Philip notes in his unpublished dissertation, Cultural Myth in Victorian Boys’ Books by Marryat, Hughes, Stevenson, and Kipling, Hughes was troubled by the “new cultural paradigms that threaten” society, and believed that whatever the problems of the age might be, these could be remedied through an appeal to Victorian values and ideals of the gentleman—”one who has been born and then trained into good sportsmanship, common sense, and unostentatious but sincere religious feelings” (Philip 93). But Tom Brown’s Schooldays also contains the early seeds of imperialism. Hughes had once declared in Boston, Massachusetts: “I am before all things an Englishman—a John Bull, if you will—loving Old England and feeling proud of her” (quoted in Richards, Happiest Days 50). In the opening pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the narrator tells of the Brown family: For centuries, in their quiet, dogged homespun way,…[they] have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeoman’s work. (Hughes 4)

Tom Brown, the protagonist of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, is the son of a country squire. After a few years spent in a private school, he is sent to Rugby where he meets his friend, Harry East, and a ring of bullies

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including Flashman. Tom defeats the bullies through his good and virtuous behavior, but becomes a delinquent partly because of his lack of religious faith and partly because of the strict school code of conduct. When Dr. Arnold, the school headmaster, puts the sickly but devout Arthur under his care, both boys become “accomplished” citizens prepared for their duty toward the Empire. Thus, Hughes fulfills his doctrine of muscular Christianity when he has Arthur teach Tom the virtues of Anglicanism, and Tom train Arthur in matters of sportsmanship. The spirit of conquest “struck the right chords later in the century when imperialism had become the dominant ideology, and the public schools were the nurseries of imperial administrators and officers” (Richards, Happiest Days 50). Hughes’s heroes function within the context of empire. In fact, at the end of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Harry East leaves to join a regiment in India, and the schoolmaster tells Tom: “Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now” (Hughes 352)—a strong suggestion that the expansion of the British empire depends on people such as Tom and Harry. According to Richards, “Rugby itself contributed those imperial heroes lauded by Hughes, William Hodson and William Cotton Oswell, as well as the doctor’s son, William Delafield Arnold, who became Director of Education in the Punjab” (Richards, Happiest Days 50). Hughes was a heroworshiper, following in the footsteps of Victorian writers such as Thomas Carlyle (Richards, Happiest Days 50). In 1843 Carlyle wrote: Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier, his life “a battle and a march” under the right General. It is forever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity, with Bareness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton—now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. (Carlyle 163–64)

Hughes wrote biographies of famous heroes such as David Livingstone and Alfred the Great. He referred to William Hodson, who died in action during the so-called Indian Mutiny in 1857, as a “glorious Christian soldier and Englishman.” Hughes eulogized his countrymen who lost their lives: “In all her long and stern history, England can point to no nobler sons than these, the heroes of India in 1857” (quoted in Richards, Happiest Days 46). The public school was not the only “nursery” for imperial adminis-

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trators; the Boy Scouts also produced these “glorious Christian soldiers and Englishmen.” In his Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire Martin Green writes: The Boy Scouts and the public schools are examples of those institutions of large cultural effectiveness which did not operate through books, and which were hardly at all expressed or reflected in serious literature. (212)

Colonel Baden-Powell, who launched the Boy Scouts, views the “spirit of practical discipline” as essentially British: Your Englishman…is endowed by nature by the spirit of practical discipline…. Whether it has been instilled into him by his public school training, by his football and his fagging, or whether it is inbred from previous generations of stern though kindly parents, one cannot say (quoted in Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun 101–02).

Both the Boy Scouts and the public schools were crucial to the maintenance of British colonial possessions abroad. At the close of the Boer War, Colonel Baden-Powell, in collaboration with Kipling’s advice, created what became known as the Boy Scouts, “to save England from the softness and the degeneracy threatening it” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 211). Both institutions provided the empire boys with the necessary patriotism, tools, and ammunition to serve the empire. It was an era that marked the beginning of the militarization of the public school. The militarization of public schools did not take place overnight. As Martin Green reminds us in The Adventurous Male: Chapters in theHistory of the White Male Mind, “adventure and patriotism were only ideological themes that surrounded (and no doubt permeated) the educational work,” but the end of the nineteenth century saw other public institutions (the Boy Scouts, the Boys’ Brigade, the Empire Youth Movement, the Navy League, the Legion of Frontiersmen, the National Service League, the Girls’ Patriotic League, the League of Empire, the British Empire Union) that began to “organize and institutionalize adventure for boys in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” (80). Green also points out that the militarization of the public schools should not be taken for granted, and that Thomas Arnold, the education theorist of the Victorian public school, might have been shocked had he lived long enough to witness this change (80). But granted

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Arnold’s patriotism and the fact that the militarization of the public school was perceived as in the interest of the British empire as a whole, there is, in reality, nothing surprising about these changes, since Arnold himself had sown the seeds of change during his tenure at the school. Arnold and Hughes were among the most influential contributors to the overall change in public school curricula, because their theories began to be applied nationwide. As early as 1871, military drill was introduced as an “alternative activity” in the Elementary School Code and gained increased acceptance during the last decade of the nineteenth century (Mangan, “Benefits Bestowed”? 40–41). When, in 1878, the Education Department “directed HMIs to excite interest in the Colonial and Foreign Possessions of the British Crown,” the burden of the empire was becoming popular: In former ages the burdens of Empire or of the State fell on the shoulders of a few; now the humblest child to be found on the benches of a primary school will in a few years be called on to influence the destinies not only of fifty-four millions of white, but of three hundred and fifty millions of coloured men and women, his fellow subjects, scattered throughout the five continents of the world—Earl of Meath, “Duty and Discipline in the Training of Children.” (quoted in Mangan, “Benefits Bestowed”? 40)

The Elementary School Code of 1882 “included information on British colonies and dependencies” as part of geography lessons in standard 6. An “alternative syllabus for the upper standards, with special emphasis on the imperial link,” was introduced by the Code of 1890 (Mangan, “Benefits Bestowed”? 41). These ideas—of patriotism, adventure, and empire—also embedded in Robinson Crusoe, gradually found their way into juvenile books. Captain Marryat’s sea adventure, Masterman Ready (1841), is an example of this genre. As Michael Philip aptly remarks, the school in Tom Brown’s Schooldays “has been made to work like the voyage [in Marryat’s sea adventures], as an alternative reality where cultural and maturational problems can be worked out” (Philip 107). CAPTAIN MARRYAT’S MASTERMAN READY (1841) Captain Frederick Marryat is arguably the first boys’ writer of Victorian England who sought to revive the spirit of Robinson Crusoe com-

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bined with the ethos of the early school story. After twenty-four years at sea in the Royal Navy, Marryat retired in 1829 and began to write. Although he initially aimed at an adult audience, his work soon became famous among boys. He published his first novel, an adult one, The Naval Officer: Or Scenes and Adventures in the Life of Frank Mildmay (1829). Mr. Midshipman Easy was published in 1836, followed by other adventure tales set in Africa: The Mission, or Scenes in Africa (1845) and Little Savage (1848). Masterman Ready (1841) was Marryat’s first juvenile tale, and in spite of its Evangelical didacticism and its teachings about empire and discipline, the novel was at odds with the imperial frame of mind of the time. That is, Marryat predicted, uncharacteristically, the eventual decay of the British empire (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 216). Arguably, more than any single writer, Marryat helped to create the naval tradition. In 1805 a particular series of events seemed to have decided the course of Marryat’s career. The battle of Trafalgar, Nelson’s victory and death, and the consequent impression of Nelson’s state funeral on the young Marryat led him to go to sea (Warner 14– 22). In September of 1806 Frederick’s father, Joseph, secured his son a place on the Imperieuse under captain Thomas Cochrane. Oliver Warner stipulates in his Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery that only an influential member of Lloyd’s and former member of Parliament could have assured his son’s reception aboard the Imperieuse. Joseph Marryat was a member and Chairman of the Committee of Lloyd’s, an association of English insurance underwriters founded in 1699. He was also a Colonial Agent for the West Indian Islands of Grenada and Trinidad, member of Parliament for Horsham and later for Sandwich, and a frequent speaker in Parliament on colonial issues. Lloyd’s popularity with the navy was well known. This organization had established a Patriotic Fund in order to “animate the brave men engaged in the defence of their country, to provide for the widows and orphans of those who fall, and to reward those who distinguish themselves in his Majesty’s service” (Warner 17–23). Frederick Marryat, therefore, was born into a family with a history of British colonial involvement which later informed his works. Marryat wrote Masterman Ready at the suggestion of his children who had enjoyed Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson.11 Instead of continuing the tale where Wyss left off, as suggested by his children, Marryat chose to write another tale à la Wyss. The similarities between Robinson Crusoe on the one hand, and The Swiss Family Robinson and Masterman Ready on the other are numer-

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ous, but one difference is striking and worthy of note: unlike Robinson Crusoe, the central figure in both Masterman Ready and The Swiss Family Robinson is a family, not an individual (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 215). Masterman Ready tells of the Seagrave family bound for Australia on the Pacific. Caught in a storm in the Indian Ocean, the crew abandons ship, and the Seagrave family and Ready, a British sailor, have to survive on an isolated island. Mr. Seagrave is a colonial settler who expects to make a fortune for his family in Australia. Mrs. Seagrave, careworn, is aided by Juno, a Black nanny, who helps take care of her four children, William, Thomas, Caroline, and Albert. Following an attack on their camp by the natives, Ready dies in battle, but the captain of the Pacific, cured of his injuries, arrives just in time to rescue the Seagraves. When the family reaches Australia, Mr. Seagrave, a surveyor by profession, finds prosperity, Tom joins the army, Caroline marries a clergyman, and Albert becomes a commander in the navy. In this narrative Ready, an ordinary seaman with fifty years of experience, functions as a masterman by instructing the Seagraves (of aristocratic background) in “practical arts of survival” on the island. Thus, Marryat “introduces the principle of hierarchy even into the wilderness and adventure setting” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 215). In this hierarchy, Juno is arguably relegated to the bottom of the social ladder, while the Seagraves occupy the top. Ready, a lower-class Englishman, views his plight (social rung) as Godordained when he says: “I am an old man with few wants, and whose life is of little importance now…. All I wish to feel is that I am trying to do my duty in that situation into which it has pleased God to call me” (Marryat 75–76). Ready’s comments suggest an unequivocal acceptance of one’s social status, whether one is of the aristocracy (the Seagraves), of the lower class (Ready himself), or a servant (Juno). This hierarchy is reminiscent of the Aristotelian formulation of the Great Chain of Being and the popular Victorian idea of predestination. Masterman Ready is essentially an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe. Susan Maher notes in her article “Recasting Crusoe: Frederick Marryat, R.M.Ballantyne and the Nineteenth-Century Robinsonnade,” that Marryat transforms Crusoe’s soul-searching and “quest for selfhood into Ready’s didactic oral history” (171). As Maher aptly points out, unlike Crusoe, Ready is a “saved” man, a “born-again” at the time of the wreck, and therefore need not undergo any major transformation or soul-searching. The major transformation in the novel involves the

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setting, the island of the castaways; that is, the transformation of the wilderness into a “mini-colony” or settlement for the Seagrave family. This transformation of the island into a settlement echoes and foreshadows British acquisition of new colonial territories toward the end of the nineteenth century. The island, then, becomes a blueprint for the test of survival and for future conquest and colonization, and provides an illustration of the white man’s burden: the duty of the British to bring light into godforsaken dark corners of the world. Paul Elmen reinforces this idea of transformation when he states in William Golding that those “savage corners of the earth would succumb to the attraction of the cult of the gentleman, and that in time the jungles of the world would be ridden in as safely as Regents Park” (quoted in Maher 171). William, who is twelve at the time of the wreck, takes to the old sailor, Ready, who instructs him in matters of survival, while Mr. Seagrave lectures him on the “nature of a colony.” The dialogue between William and his father sheds light on British colonial history: it relates how the English came to dominate the seas after the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Dutch: “At that time, now more than 300 years ago, England was not the powerful nation which she now is, and had comparatively few ships; neither could the English, in enterprise, be compared to the Spanish and Portuguese nations…. My dear boy, you know very well that a man is born, arrives at manhood and strength, grows old, decays, and dies. As it is with man, so it is with nations. The Portuguese were then in their manhood as a nation; but other nations rose up in strength; and among others the Dutch, who were the first to dispute with the Portuguese the commerce of the Indies: gradually they wrested their colonies from them, and carried on trade in their stead. Then the English forced their way there, seized upon the since held possession (Marryat 115–16).”

“Tell me,’“ William inquires, “‘why are England and other nations so anxious to have what you call colonies?’“ Using the analogy between a child and its parents, Mr. Seagrave explains to his son the interdependency between a colony and the so-called mother country: “‘In infancy, the mother country assists and supports the colony as an infant; as it advances and becomes vigorous, the colony returns the obligation: but the parallel does not end there…. As soon as the colony has grown strong and powerful enough to take care of itself, it throws off the yoke of subjection, and declares itself independent’“

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(Marryat 116). Mr. Seagrave cites the example of the United States which, once a colony of Great Britain, had become one of the most powerful nations. “But is it not very ungrateful of a colony to leave the mother country, which has protected it so long, as soon as it no longer requires its assistance?” “It may at first appear to be so; but on reflection, we must decide otherwise: the mother country has been more than repaid for what it has done for the colony long before the colony is able to throw off its dependence; and after a certain time, the rights assumed by the mothercountry become too onerous to bear: you must not treat a grown-up man as you would a child.” “Now, father, answer me another question. You said that nations rise and fall; and you have mentioned the Portuguese as proof. Will England ever fall, and be of no more importance as Portugal is now?” “We can only decide that question by looking into history; and history tells us that such is the fate of all nations. We must, therefore, expect that it will one day be the fate of our dear country…. Recollect that when the Roman empire was in the height of its powers, Great Britain was peopled by mere barbarians and savages. Now Rome has disappeared, and is only known in history, and by the relics of its former greatness, while England ranks among the highest nations. How is the major part of the continent of Africa peopled? by barbarians and savages; and who knows what they may become some future day?” “What! the negroes become a great nation?” “That is exactly what the Romans might have said in former days. What! the British barbarians become a great nation? and yet they have become so.” “But the negroes, father,—they are blacks.” “Very true; but that is no reason to the contrary. As to the darkness of the skin, the majority of the Moors are quite as black as the negroes; yet they were once a great nation, and, moreover, the most enlightened nation of their time, with a great many excellent qualities, full of honour, generosity, politeness, and chivalry. They conquered and held the major part of Spain for many hundred years; introduced arts and science then unknown, and were as brave and heroic as they were virtuous and honorable.” (Marryat 116–18)

Despite his condescending tone,12 not only does Mr. Seagrave teach his son—and by extension the British youth—the nature of empires in general, and the rise of the British empire in particular, he also predicts its inevitable fall. Mr. Seagrave’s acknowledgment that it is the plight of all nations or empires to grow and decay may have been the basis for Martin Green’s argument that, although Masterman Ready

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reflects “the early Victorian mood, full of the vigor of English Puritanism,” it was not in accordance with the imperial mindset, and was consequently supplanted by “something almost opposite” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 216). Likewise, Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness (1902), hints at the rise and fall of ancient empires when he writes that River Thames (England) had once been one of the dark places on earth, but when the Romans came, “light came out of this river since.” Marryat and later Conrad attempt to demonstrate that Romans brought light to the English but became a forgotten race while the English rose to prominence. But, does this intimation apply to the Dark Continent? Following this line of thought, could Africans also rise to probity with the advent of the British, bearers of the “torch of enlightenment”? It seems to be impossible, at least for William, to fathom the fall of the British empire and the rise of Black people to prominence. William is distressed by his father’s insinuation that the British empire will also fade away and be surpassed by other races, probably Africans. He retorts: “What! the negroes become a great nation?… But the negroes, father,—they are blacks.” It is noteworthy that William is cognizant of the incapability of Black people to become a great nation, but remains ignorant about the fact that the earliest and greatest civilizations were not European. Mr. Seagrave convinces his son that skin pigmentation is irrelevant, and cites the Moors13 who preceded the Romans and the British in building great civilizations. In Africans and Their History, historian Joseph Harris opined that “if Plato, Eudoxe, and Pythagoras remained in Egypt for thirteen to twenty years, ‘it was not only to learn recipes’“ (26). The Senegalese historian and writer Cheik Anta Diop contends: It remains…true that the Egyptian experiment was essentially Negro, and that all Africans can draw the same moral advantage from it that Westerners draw from Graeco-Latin civilization, (quoted in Harris 26)

What most writers of the century often failed to teach their readers, whether juvenile or adults, was that in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia great nations and civilizations have existed, reigned, and collapsed before the Romans and the English. History teaches us that the civilizations that built the pyramids in Egypt and Sudan were neither Roman nor English. Although Michael Philip notes Marryat’s carelessness with “historical and geographical fact,” and his occasional

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distortions,14 Marryat was among the few writers of the nineteenth century to notice that civilizations and cultures are not static, and to predict the decline of the British empire. Hence, despite the strong Christian didacticism found in Masterman Ready, it was not a typical novel of the Victorian era vis-à-vis imperialism. But race stereotyping is constant in the characterization of Juno—the contented servant, the source of comic relief, the retainer who is devoid of all human qualities except unswerving loyalty. Both her garbled English and her appearance signify that she is viewed as a perpetual alien (despite all the father-to-son lectures on nationhood). Even when she injures herself in order to protect the family infant, she is the brunt of derision: “‘She saved the child, and I fear, hurt herself.’ “‘I thump my head very bad,’“ said Juno smiling. “‘Yes, it’s lucky that you have a good, thick, woolly coat over it,’ replied Captain Osborn, laughing” (Marryat 7). In conformance with Marryat’s Christian themes, the captain adds, “‘Never mind, Juno, you are a good girl.’“ But the white supremacist implications remain. The middle and late nineteenth century saw a change in juvenile literature when it became, to some degree, “captured by the aristomilitary” caste. Adventure came to replace the fable, focusing on the greatness, not the decline, of empire; the “virtues taught were pluck, dash, lion-heartedness, not obedience, duty, and piety” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 220). Kingston, Ballantyne, and Henty dominated this period in juvenile literature associated with empire. W.H.G.KINGSTON’S IN THE WILDS OF AFRICA (1871) Kingston was a popular boys’ writer who wrote and published over one hundred books between 1850 and 1880. The Kingston’s Magazine for Boys (1859) was to greet “the young men of Great Britain, Ireland, the British colonies, and the United States of America” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 174). The story has been told of young servants of empire who frequently asked themselves: “What would Kingston think about what I am doing now. Am I measuring up to his standards” (quoted in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 48). Born in 1814 in London, Kingston was one of eleven children of a family of English gentry. His ancestors were “Fellows of the Royal Society, members of Parliament, justices of the peace, dons and admirals.” He spent his childhood in Regent’s Park and in Portugal where

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his father had business interests and where he began writing adult romances with a Gothic tint. He returned to live in England in 1844, and became interested in emigration issues. Kingston became a member and later honorary secretary of the Colonization Society for which he wrote “manuals and publicity pamphlets.” He also edited the Colonial Magazine between 1849 and 1852 (Bratton 115–16). Colonization at its embryonic stage following the emancipation bill (1833), was necessitated by socio-economic factors. Jacqueline Bratton states in The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction that Kingston deemed the colonies as “fields of endeavour for working men of the lower and middle classes, and the men themselves, and their wives and families, as being in urgent need of cultivation by Christian missionaries” (116). As secretary of the Colonization Society, Kingston saw to it that SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) tracts, prayer books and Bibles were supplied to ships to facilitate “ministration at the dockside and on the voyage.” He also aided the SPCK in producing a “practical manual” on emigration (Bratton 116). While Marryat’s heroes strive to (and always do) acquire material wealth in the colonies or in the course of their adventures, Kingston’s return penniless, “but infinitely richer having learned to fear God, to worship Him in his works, and to trust to His infinite mercy” (Bratton 117). This is the case of the hero of Peter the Whaler (1851), Kingston’s first boys’ book. Kingston, although an advocate of emigration, emphasizes the perils and dangers of life in Australia in The Gilpins and Their Fortunes (1864). Oftentimes in their writings, proponents of emigration in the 1840s and 1850s denote the sharp disparity between the “squalid” urban settings of England, from which the hero usually escapes, and “new worlds of freedom and opportunity where hard work brings its just rewards, free of the overcrowded slums and limited prospects of English working life” (Mackenzie 86). In the 1860s writers began to realize that the optimistic tone of their stories could mislead readers and would-be settlers if they did not point out the dangers of colonial life. The Gilpins and Their Fortunes and In the Wilds of Africa (1871) marked a shift in imperialist writing for boys, and in this shift, “the idyllic vision of England became semiotically important as the inspiration and justification of empire” (MacKenzie 87). In other words: The tension between Old England, its beauty and cultivated fertility, its security, its beloved associations with family or sweetheart left behind,

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and the new lands of promise, which are exciting, but also hard and masculine, dangerously unfamiliar, lawless and lonely, is a deep structural polarity in the fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century (MacKenzie 87).

In the Wilds of Africa, our specific reference, is another Robinsonnade, and bears resemblance to Marryat’s Masterman Ready. It relates the dangers and perils of life in the colonies, as well as its benefits and rewards from a British perspective. The narrator, Andrew, an accountant in his father’s firm, goes to sea after his father’s business has collapsed. The family retires to a modest cottage in Cheshire, leaving Andrew and his two brothers no choice but to “seek their fortunes in the world.” Before Andrew leaves on his first expedition, his father counsels him: “Recollect that you were bought with a price and are not your own. You have no business to follow your own fancies, or to gratify any of the propensities fallen nature possesses,…. God has given you a body, but ever remember that he has given you a mind to regulate that body…. Therefore, Andrew, read the Bible daily for guidance; go daily to the throne of grace for enlightenment and direction, that you may keep your high principles bright and ever fit for action.” (Kingston 16)

Andrew and the Hyslop family leave aboard the Osprey, en route for South Africa. Captain Stanley Hyslop (a relative of Andrew), is accompanied by his two daughters, Kate and Isabella, and his two younger brothers, David and Leonard. Hyslop is a retired military officer going to settle in the Cape Colony (South Africa) where his parents live. David is a surgeon by profession, relocating to practice in South Africa. The Osprey is bound for the Cape of Good Hope to land passengers and to trade in palm oil, beeswax, gold dust, and ivory in exchange for goods from Manchester and Birmingham. Also aboard are Terence O’Brien, an Irishman who is going to settle in the Cape Colony, and a Portuguese, Senhor Silva. As the sea becomes turbulent, the crew abandons ship and makes it ashore in a tiny boat only to be murdered by the natives who have the reputation of killing European slave traders. Peter Timbo, who is familiar with the people of the Cape, is not surprised that the crew is attacked because “de white man make them slaves, and so when dey catch de white men dey kill them” (Kingston 43). The castaway passengers, like Crusoe, remain on a nearby island where they battle not only with wild animals, but also

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with “hostile natives.” The Hyslops and Andrew eventually survive and become colonists in the Cape. Conquest, colonization, and immigration are the main themes of this book. Timbo is a character that reveals British involvement in colonization schemes and in the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In an attack on his village by slave raiders, Timbo is kidnapped and sold to Portuguese slave traders, but he is rescued by a British patrol ship. After serving a few years on the British ship, he is discharged at the Cape where he later meets the Hyslop family and becomes a servant to Captain Hyslop. Timbo is indebted to the British not only for their active role in the abolition struggle, but also for his conversion to Christianity: “Ah, Massa Andrew, we nebber know as kind God does what is good for us. I bery sorrowful when slaver people carry me off from my home in Pongo country. I t’ink I go to die, dat dere was no God to look after poor black fellow. I know only of Fetish. Den I get among white men, and I see and hear much dat is bad, and still I t’ink dere is no God. Den years pass by, and I hear of the merciful Saviour, who die for me; and I say, ‘Dat is just what I want,’ and I learn to be Christian.” (Kingston 19)

Timbo is a convert, a new man, owing to his contact with Western civilization, and as the novel progresses, he eventually becomes a missionary among his people while still in the service of Captain Hyslop. The above quote reiterates the theory that Christianity was the cure for slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade, as though the British or Christians had never been involved in the trade in humans. But Senhor Silva explains to the castaways that the natives’ hostility toward the White man is a result of the latter’s previous treacherous dealings with Africans: “When we have shown them that we are friends, and desire to do them all the good in our power, we, I hope, shall find them faithful; but they have become so debased by their intercourse with the white people, and especially, I am sorry to say, with my countrymen, who often deal treacherously with them, that they cannot be depended on. They in return, as might naturally be supposed, cheat and deceive the whites in every way. The sin, I confess lies at the door of the more civilized race, who ought to have set them a good example.” (Kingston 86)

Although Senhor Silva does not perceive the inhabitants of the Cape as civilized, he aptly points out that the people have become debased

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as a result of their “intercourse with the white people, and especially… with my countrymen.” It is important to highlight the fact that Senhor Silva is a Portuguese, and by emphasizing that the Portuguese intercourse with Africans has debased the latter, Kingston shows his attempt to condemn the Portuguese continuation of the trade when the British had already abolished it. This device also allows the narrator to applaud British initiative in the abolition and to legitimize their presence in Africa. But, if European contact with Africa has debasing consequences on the latter, as Senhor Silva claims, what prevents the civilized from setting a good example for the savage? Andrew is a David Livingstone when he comments: “Nearly all the negro tribes on this part of the coast have the spirit of trade strongly implanted in them; and I cannot help thinking that it is so for the purpose of ultimately bringing about their civilization, which the nefarious slave trade has so long retarded. That trade is one of the sins which lies at England’s door, and she should endeavour to make amends for the crime, by using every means in her power for the spread of Christianity and civilization among the long benighted Africans” (Kingston 113).

While it is true that the slave trade left an indelible scar on the continent and its diaspora, it would be misleading to assume that colonization was meant to compensate for the cultural, physical, and psychological damage. Rather, the introduction of Christianity and European culture into Africa (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) became a cure for European socio-economic problems. For example, by adopting a European mode of life, Africans became consumers of European goods and stimulated European economy. Colonization was also one of the ways Europe was able to get rid of its unwanted citizens. The so-called amends for the crime (colonization, in this case) are more destructive than beneficial to Africans, granted the psychological and physical scars colonization left on the continent. How can one speak of amends when slavery is replaced by colonization? Andrew’s recognition that “that trade is one of the sins which lies at England’s door” becomes hollow if colonization and European civilization become substitutes for slavery. We are also led to believe that colonization would not have been necessary if the natives were not heathens or cannibals. In In the Wilds of Africa a village chief has to require British assistance to fight neighboring villages: “Unless you white men will help us, we cannot hope

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to oppose them…. It is said that they eat up all the enemies they kill” (Kingston 167). Here, again, anarchy, heathenism, and cannibalism are used to legitimize British intervention. Additionally the Africans are described as physically inferior, a pattern in nineteenth-century novels that Kingston sustains. He uses his description of Timbo to suggest a permanent and inevitable outsider status: He had thick lips, a huge flattish nose, and somewhat high head, covered with thick curling wool, now beginning to show signs of turning grey…. [F]rom the way his master treated him,…it was evident that he must be a worthy man, notwithstanding his want of personal attractions. (Kingston 19)

Notwithstanding these phenotypic “flaws,” Timbo is valued for the cultural work he can perform for the British. He begins his missionary activities among the natives: Timbo had set off to Kabomba, in the hope, as he said, of telling the natives about the Bible, showing them how much superior is the white man’s religion to their foolish idolatry. They had listened more readily than he had expected; and his great wish now was to return there at some future day with missionaries, who might teach them to read about the matter themselves. (Kingston 483)

In this novel Kingston’s message of colonization is transparently clear. Despite the hostile natives the castaways decide to settle in the Cape as previously planned. Andrew sends a message to the British youth, emphasizing perseverance and faith in God within the context of overseas empire and emigration: “I may say of myself and of all friends indeed, that ‘whatsoever our hands find to do, we do it with all our might’ humbly endeavouring to serve God in our daily walk in life, and thereby enjoy that true happiness which even in this world can be obtained by those who know the right way to seek it” (560). Ballantyne’s Black Ivory further develops this missionary message as well as the themes of emigration and slavery. BALLANTYNE’S BLACK IVORY (1873) Robert Michael Ballantyne was the son of a Scottish newspaper owner whose brother printed Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Because Scott at this stage of his writing career was not willing to admit authorship,

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Robert’s father was given the task of copying the novels. Scott’s financial problems involved the Ballantynes as well, and Robert, at the age of sixteen, had to leave school. He became apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and was sent to Canada where he spent several years in remote areas, trading in fur with Indians. When he returned to Scotland, he began to work as a junior partner in a printing company, and in 1848 he published his memoirs with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Hudson’s Bay. The death of his father and sister probably turned him toward religious endeavor: he formed a Bible-reading class, and became an Elder of the Free Kirk. It was at the suggestion of the Edinburgh publisher Nelson that Ballantyne began to write for a juvenile audience, after he had produced a juvenile story about North America which proved very successful. He wrote The Young FurTraders (originally entitled Snowflakes and Sunbeams), and before its publication in 1856, Ballantyne had already given up his job and resolved to make a living from writing, painting, and lecturing on his North American experiences (Carpenter & Prichard 1984:42). The success of The Young Fur-Traders led to other juvenile books including Coral Island and Black Ivory. In my discussion I’ll focus on Black Ivory. In his books Ballantyne devised a pattern that he was to follow throughout his writing career. Stuart Hannabuss, in his article “Ballantyne’s Message of Empire” comments on this pattern in a telling manner: The central narrative thread was the episodic and often picaresque adventure of a tenderfoot hero, whose manly courage and good moral sense, coupled with much coincidence and occasional authorial intervention, took him safely through a series of adventures, usually pitted against overtly characterised enemies, usually assisted by obviously good men like missionaries and whimsical (and, by modern standards, racist or paternalistic) caricatures of Irish, black or other personalities (quoted in Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 55).

Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure Among the Slavers in East Africa (1873) is a story about the Atlantic Slave Trade. It chronicles the adventures of Harold Seadrift and a sailor from his father’s ship, Disco Lillihammer, into the interior of the east coast of Africa where they come face to face with the realities and atrocities of the trade in humans. Harold’s adventure turns into an antislavery crusade as he witnesses the inhumanity of the slave trade which is still carried out

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by the Portuguese and Arabs. With the help of his African friends, Harold rescues hundreds of captives, including an African chief, Kambira, and his wife, Azinté. He also visits the Seychelles where a camp has been erected to care for the rescued slaves. Back at the Cape, Harold announces his engagement to Alice Gray, only daughter of the late Sir Eustace Gray, who leaves his daughter a fortune “next to nothing.” Harold makes plans to visit England, come back, and settle down with his family at the Cape. Meanwhile, Kambira, Azinté, and their son Obo find jobs respectively as head gardener, cook, and page-inwaiting within the Harold Seadrift circle. Black Ivory is essentially a sea adventure story, a Robinsonnade, that turns into an antislavery endeavor. Harold Seadrift’s dreams of adventure in Africa materialize when his father charters a ship for the purpose. Before he sets on his adventure into the “wilds of Africa” his father counsels him thus: “Harold, my boy, here is a chance for paying a visit to the land you’ve read and talked so much about, and wished often to travel through. I have chartered a brig, and shall send her out to Zanzibar with a cargo of beads, cotton cloth, brass wire, and such like: what say you to go as supercargo? Of course you won’t be able to follow in the steps of Livingstone or Mungo Park, but while the brig is at Zanzibar you will have an opportunity of running across the channel, the island being only a few miles from the main, and having a short run up-country to see the niggers, and perchance have a slap at a hippopotamus. I’ll line your pockets, so that you won’t lack the sinews of war, without which travel either at home or abroad is but sorry work, and I shall only expect you to give a good account of ship and cargo on your return—Come, is it fixed?” (Balllantyne 3).

But when faced with the cruelties of Arab and Portuguese enslavers, his adventure turns into missionary work.15 Harold and Disco come into contact for the first time with what the Arab slave trader Yoosoof refers to as “Black Ivory”: “In what sort of goods do you trade?” “Ivory. Some be white, an’ some be what your countrymans do call black.” “Black!” “Yees, black. White ivory do come from the elephant—hims tusk; Black Ivory, do come…from the land everywheres. It bees our chef artikil of trade.” “Indeed! I never heard of it before.”

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“No?…. You shall see it much here.”

The novel, besides being a tale of adventure, develops other themes that require our attention. Like In the Wilds of Africa, Black Ivory exposes the inhumanity of the Atlantic Slave Trade and applauds the British role in its abolition. In Black Ivory, Harold and Disco, both Englishmen, illustrate British abolitionist and colonial motives; as Disco contends: “[T]here’s only one way to cure it,…and that is, to bring the Portuguese and Arabs to their marrow-bones; put the fleet on the east coast in better workin’ order; have consuls everywhere with orders to keep their weather-eyes open to slave-dealers; start two or three British settlements —ports o’ refuge—on the mainland; hoist the Union Jack, and, last, but not the least, send ‘em the Bible.” (Ballantyne 415–16)

The narrator acknowledges the fact that the British are not altogether blameless in regard to slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ballantyne’s approach to and understanding of slavery and the slave trade follow those of David Livingstone years earlier; in fact, reference is made throughout the book to Livingstone, and his work in East Africa. In the preface to Black Ivory, Ballantyne states that his goal is to give a “true picture” of the slave trade as it exists on the east coast of Africa. He acknowledges his indebtedness to Rev. Charles New, an interpreter to the Livingstone Search Expedition. Hence, the novel is thoroughly footnoted to attest to the veracity of the information it contains. Ballantyne claims: “I have selected from the most trustworthy sources what I believe to be the most telling points of ‘the trade,’ and have woven these together into a tale, the warp of which is composed of thick cords of fact; the woof of slight lines of fiction, just sufficient to hold the fabric together” (Ballantyne iii). According to his biographer, Eric Quayle, Ballantyne became interested in the subject of slavery after reading a report of an antislavery meeting held in Leeds (Quayle 261). He later decided to write Black Ivory in condemnation of the trade—as an antislavery document. But a closer look at the novel reveals the true objectives behind both the passing of the emancipation bill and British pioneering efforts to abolish the trade. Despite Ballantyne’s objective, Black Ivory avoids British accountability for the trade, and puts the blame primarily on the Arabs (the Sultan of Zanzibar) and the Portuguese. He portrays Africans as defenseless savages and the British as benevolent saviors.

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It is almost impossible for someone without familiarity with the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade to appreciate Britain’s active involvement and domination of the trade at one point in time, not to mention the fact that Queen Elizabeth herself had financed slave-ship expeditions. In his Africans and Their History historian Joseph Harris asserts that in order for the British to start colonization, encourage settlements of British citizens on the African continent, and promote European culture through Christianity, they had to make Africa safe by encouraging, even initiating, the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade which might have otherwise jeopardized their newly found colonization and exploitation schemes (91). Colonization was slavery in different garb. In spite of its condescending tone, Black Ivory gives a sociohistorical interpretation of the “peculiar institution.” The African agency regarding the trade is aptly viewed in the following terms: [F]athers do not, indeed, sell their own children, or husbands their wives,…but chiefs and head men are by no means loath to get rid of their criminals in this way—their bad stock, as it were, of black ivory…. Meanwhile he [the slave trader] takes up his quarters near some tribe, and sets about deliberately to produce war. He rubs up old sores, foments existing quarrels, lends guns and ammunition, suggests causes of dispute, and finally gets two tribes to fight.” (Ballantyne 182–83)

Although the narrator, here, is referring to the methods of Arabs and Portuguese slave traders, it is without question that the British had previously used the same strategies in securing slaves in Africa. Black Ivory reveals a pattern characteristic of nineteenth-century “fiction of empire”: it advocates colonization, and negates or denigrates African culture so as to justify the so-called need to impose British culture. This pattern is evidenced in Black Ivory: Africans are constantly referred to as savages even if their names are known. The narrator points out that “savages have no literature,” since they “cannot read or write therefore, and have no permanent records of the deeds of their forefathers…. Neither have they any religion worthy of the name. This is indeed a serious evil, one which civilized people of course deplore…” (Ballantyne 168). It is clear that the narrator mistakes illiteracy for lack of literature, since historically, the people he refers to have their poets, musicians, and griots. In Black Ivory Makompa illustrates the existence of oral literature (orature) in the ditty he composes to praise the deeds of the British:

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De English come to see, Yo ho! Dat werry good for we, Yo ho! No’ take us ‘way for slaves, Nor put us in our graves, But set the black mans free…(Ballantyne 250)

While the content of Makompa’s ditty is an acknowledgment of British benevolence, and an affirmation of the white man’s burden, by creating the character of Makompa, the author contradicts his claim that the people have no literature. The alleged lack of literature and religion justifies the “civilizing mission” of Victorian England. It is also interesting to point out that in Black Ivory, the author ironically attempts to dismantle the myth of the savage. A conversation between Harold and Disco attests to this attempt: “The savages, as we call ‘em, bores holes in their lips an’ sticks rings into ‘em. The civilized folk, as we call ourselves, bores holes in their ears an’ sticks rings into ‘em. W’eres the difference? that’s wot I want to know.” “There’s not much difference in principle,…but there’s great difference in appearance. Ear-rings hang gracefully; lip-rings stick out horribly.” “H’m! it appears to me that that’s a matter o’ taste, now. Howsoever, I do admit that lip-rings is wuss than ear-rings…but as I said before, so I says again, it’s all in the principle w’ere it lies…. It is my opinion that there ain’t no such thing as savages—or if you choose to put it the other way, we’re all savages together.” (Ballantyne 194–196).

Notwithstanding these discussions and musings between Harold and Disco on the semantics of the term savage, the “civilizing mission” still takes place. Harold begins telling Bible stories to the natives, instead of his usual Robinson Crusoe tales and its adaptations. He prescribes two remedies to the problem of slavery: There must be points or centres of refuge for the oppressed on the mainland of Africa, and there must be the introduction of the Bible. The first is essential to the second. Where anarchy, murder, injustice, and tyranny are rampant and triumphant, the advance of the missionary is either terribly slow or altogether impossible. The life-giving, soul-

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softening Word of God, is the only remedy for the woes of mankind, and, therefore, the only cure for Africa. To introduce it effectually, and along with its civilisation and all the blessings that flow therefrom, it is indispensable that Great Britain should obtain, by treaty or by purchase, one or more pieces of land there to establish free Christian negro settlements, and with force sufficient to defend them from the savages, and worse than savages—the Arab and Portuguese half-caste barbarians who infest the land. (Ballantyne 389–90).

As the above quote indicates, conquest and colonization through the teachings of the Bible remain the main objectives in Ballantyne’s Black Ivory: “it is indispensable that Great Britain should obtain, by treaty or by purchase, one or more pieces of land there to establish free Christian negro settlements, and with force sufficient to defend them from the savages.” The negro settlements recall the repatriation schemes advocated by various abolitionist movements to rid England of its Black population after emancipation. The narrator nevertheless concedes how the natives have come to distrust the White man. On one of their missions to teach the gospel, Harold is told: What the white man says may be true, but the white men seem to tell lies too much. The men who killed our warriors, burned our villages, and took women and children away, came to us saying that they were friends; that they were the servants of the same people as the white man Livingstone, and wanted to trade with us. When we believed and trusted them, and were off our guard, they fired on us with their guns. We know not what to think or believe. (271)

As indicated in this statement, nineteenth-century writers were sometimes ambivalent about the civilizing mission. But all the novelists discussed in this chapter played a role in the building and maintenance of the British empire by perpetuating existing myths about Africans. Moreover, Hughes’s muscular Christianity and Defoe’s emphasis on adventure, emigration, and colonization had a strong impact on juvenile literature, which became more and more aggressive and ethnocentric in temperament. Although Thomas Arnold, the education theorist, might have been appalled at the militarization of the public schools, by the 1880s this militarization became the norm, and public schools became a breeding ground for the young empire-builders we will encounter in George Henty’s novels. But unlike Marryat, Henty did not believe in the rise and fall of empires. With the exception of By Sheer Pluck, the religious or missionary component of the civilizing

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mission (found in Marryat, Kingston, and Ballantyne) is absent in Henty’s juvenile books set in Africa. Henty sustained the idea that the British had a “divine” mission to “civilize” the world through military might (guns), but not necessarily through evangelicalism (the Bible). The next chapter is an analysis of the socio-cultural background to Henty’s juvenile books set in Africa—novels that combined both the elements of adventure and the school story with a military tint. NOTES 1. Fred Inglis distinguishes children’s literature from that of adults by the following characteristics: (1) In books specifically written for children the protagonists are children, people like themselves; (2) children’s literature, he argues, is less concerned with “probability in plot and circumstance” than adult novels; (3) children’s books are usually, but not necessarily, shorter than adult novels; (4) the story is marked by “its conscious limitation of formal intricacy”; (5) the syntax is simple, and (6) there is a simplification (but not a superficial treatment) of moral issues (Inglis 101–02). Ruth MacDonald, while in agreement with Inglis, adds three characteristics of her own. She notes that the tone in children’s literature is optimistic, the writing is presented in an active way, and the form of narrative often includes time travel, initiation into adulthood, and the rise and fall of fortune (14). 2. The adventure story of the nineteenth century owes its popularity to the growing influence of popular fiction. In the context of the 1830s, the term popular fiction referred to the literature that the masses of the English people could buy cheaply. In her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago, Margaret Dalziel defines popular fiction as “books and magazines that are read purely for pleasure by people to whom pleasure is incompatible with the expenditure of intellectual or emotional effort” (1). This definition speaks to the primary objective of popular fiction, that is, it aims at entertainment rather than reform or education. At the beginning of the century, Cobbett published some cheap periodicals advocating a series of political programs, but after a while these ceased to appear. In 1825, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded to provide cheap literature without any religious or political bias. In 1832 for the first time, three cheap weekly periodicals appeared, and their success testified to the demand for cheap literature. For

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

the most part, these periodicals tended to attack the existing state of affairs and the world known to the readers, rather than create the Utopian world usually associated with fictional adventure (Dalziel 23). Beginning in 1841 and continuing for ten years, Edward Lloyd, a businessman, published cheap periodicals and novels appearing in penny weekly parts (hence the name “penny dreadfuls”) which in the 1860s were directed toward the juvenile public and dealt with adventure, violence and crime (Dalziel 23). The first edition of Robinson Crusoe appeared on April 25, 1719, when its author was fifty-eight. The second edition came out seventeen days later; twenty-five days later a third, and the fourth on August 8. It was then serialized in the Original London Post, being the first serial in the English language. This 1793 anonymous poem by an African slave attests to how slavery was perceived as a form of cannibalism. But as Jan Nederveen Pieterse noted in his White on Black (1992), this “counteraccusation from the standpoint of the colonized” or enslaved received little or no attention in the West (Pieterse 120). It is worth pointing out that whether cannibalism in this poem is used as a metaphor for slavery or as an allegation, the poem was a response to a real brutality meted out to Africans, whereas the cannibalism Africans are often accused of in European writings about Africa is baseless. He became so indebted that a newspaper carried the following advertisement offering fifty pounds reward for his arrest: “A middle-sized, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth” (Bryce 6). Alexander Selkirk (1676–1721) was born in Fife. At the age of twenty-seven he ran away to sea. In 1704, having quarreled with his captain, he requested to be put ashore on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez where he remained until 1709 when he was rescued by Woodes Rogers, commander of a privateering expedition (Drabble 836). This idea was apparently popularized by Montaigne’s 1580 essay “On Cannibals”—the notion that “primitive” peoples were morally superior to “civilized” peoples of Europe. The Bible helped foster this notion by providing the image of the primitive as pure and uncorrupted before the Fall of Man. (Beckson and Ganz 215).

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8. I shall develop this idea of regression into savagery in chapter 6 in relation to Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 9. Although he admired Arnold’s character, he was at odds with some of his politics. 10. In Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes defines “muscular Christian” in these terms: “[A]s far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men” (see Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford 99). 11. Johann David Wyss, a Swiss pastor, wrote The Swiss Family Robinson (1812–1813) in German. It was translated into English the following year. An adaptation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, it is a story of a family wrecked on a desert island. 12. The child-parent metaphor in colonial discourse has been discussed by many theorists, including Homi Bhabha. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha discusses T.B.Macaulay’s essay in which the latter argues that the Directors of East India Company gave orders (to colonial administrators) which simply meant that the latter should “be the father and the oppressor of the people…” (quoted in Bhabha 95). The authors of The Empire Writes Back also argue that the “parent-child” metaphor sanctions colonial discourse, in that it emphasizes “age, experience, roots, tradition, and…[a]bove all…final authority in questions of taste and value” (Ashcroft et al. 16). This is particularly important when we consider terms such as mother-country to designate the colonizer’s relation to the colonized. Whether the colonizer is seen as the father or the mother of the child, the colonized individual is—and remains—a child. Whereas a child matures, becomes adult and autonomous, the child in colonial discourse (the colonized or “native”) never matures, but remains a child in need of protection, surveillance, and control. 13. To negate any Black contribution to world civilization, Europe treated, and still treats, Egypt as separate from Africa. Hence Shakespeare’s Othello is a Moor, not African. 14. Philip also discussed Marryat’s use of America as an “analogue for the undeveloped person (the repulsive child).” Apparently, he

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was unpopular in the United States because of his “cockiness and condescension,” and was “threatened with lynching and burnt in effigy” (82). 15. Unlike Harold (who goes to Africa as an adventurer but becomes a missionary), Livingstone was a missionary who became an explorer. Livingstone believed that the introduction of commerce and Christianity would deter Africans from participating in the trade in humans.

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CHAPTER 3

To Africa with Henty The Socio-Cultural Background

More even than the Indian books, Henty’s African stories highlight his attitudes to race, to empire and to his general concept of white—and British—superiority. —Guy Arnold, Held Fast for England

Colonialism conceptually depopulated countries either by acknowledging the native but relegating him or her to the category of the subhuman, or simply by looking through the native and denying his/her existence. These were necessary practices for invoking the claim of terra nullius upon which the now-disputed legality of imperial settlement (as opposed to “invasion”) was based. Only empty spaces can be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanizing the inhabitants…. Inscribing the natives as primitive and unable to make use of the natural resources around them allowed first the biblical parable of the ten talents, and then the Darwinian theory of natural selection to justify their dispossession as part of the plan of Destiny. —Chris Tiffin and Allan Lawson, De-Scribing Empire

It is crucial to stress, at the outset, that the apparent civilizing mission undertaken by the British government in the mid-nineteenth century did not convince all its citizens of the importance of maintaining colonies abroad, and consequently drew a great deal of anti-imperialist 64

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sentiment. Not until the Great Depression (1873–1896) did it become clear that the real mission of imperialism was not to “civilize the savages” of India and Africa but to redress the slagging British economy. The period of the Great Depression coincided with the age of this new imperialism, and brought proponents and opponents of the issue of colonization together. Advocates of colonization became increasingly prominent as they became more convinced that colonization would be the only way out of the economic stagnation resulting from German and American competitors, and other political and social embarrassments of the day (Ausubel 81). As the depression wore on, former opponents of overseas territorial occupation became its supporters. For instance, before he became prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli wrote to Lord Derby: “Leave the Canadians to defend themselves; recall the African squadron; give up the settlements on the west coast of Africa; and we shall make a saving which will, at the same time, enable us to build ships and have a good Budget” (quoted in Ausubel 83). But a few years later in his Crystal Palace address in 1872, Disraeli condemned Liberals for having viewed the colonies solely from an economic standpoint, thus totally ignoring “those moral and political considerations which make nations great, and by the influence of which alone men are distinguished from animals” (Ausubel 84). In fact during his ministry he oversaw the annexation of Fiji, the purchase of shares of the Suez Canal, the proclamation of the Queen Empress of India, British protection of Turkey under Russian expansionism, the acquisition of Cyprus, and the defeat of the Zulus in South Africa. The Great Depression was still under way by the end of Disraeli’s term (1874–1880), when publicists began to convince the British from all walks of life that the survival of their country depended on colonial expansion. Referring to John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883), Herman Ausubel argued that the colonies “offered land for the landless and the prospect of wealth for those in financial distress” (85). Seeley had maintained that England needed the colonies where the “surplus population” could relocate and “continue to be Britons.” Seeley also predicted that in fifty years the United States and Russia would become “super powers,” and surpass countries like Germany and France (Ausubel 85). After the publication of The Expansion of England in 1833, James Anthony Froude, a prominent historian of the Tudors, conceived the idea of a Commonwealth of Oceana that would link the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Froude defended his thesis by focusing on the decline of Britain’s economic position: In the multiplying number of our fellow citizens animated by a common spirit, we should have purchasers for our goods from whom we should fear no rivalry; we should turn in upon them the tide of our emigrants which now flows away, while the emigrants themselves thrive under their own fig tree, and rear children with stout limbs and colour in their cheeks, and a chance before them of human existence, (quoted in Ausubel 85)

Politicians also displayed interest and hope for the future in the acquisition of colonial space. After serving as prime minister in the Conservative governments of 1885 and 1886–1892, Lord Salisbury declared in the House of Lords in 1895, immediately before his third term, that it was the duty and responsibility of the English government to facilitate access to fertile regions like Uganda: “You must open the path,” he said, “it is for you to enable our people to get there. It is for you to enable capital to be invested and commerce to be extended” (quoted in Ausubel 87). In 1895 Joseph Chamberlain became secretary of state for the colonies primarily because he “desired to see whether there may not be room for still further developing our resources in these new countries and for opening up British markets” (quoted in Ausubel 87). Chamberlain’s desire was to see Britain protect and maintain its colonial territories and to extend those possessions. Consequently during his tenure numerous colonial projects were undertaken: road and railroad building in West Africa, research in tropical medicine and colonial agriculture, access to “development” loans, and the Boer War was fought with assistance from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which were already part of the British empire (Ausubel 88). But all this could not have happened, and with efficacy, without the infamous Berlin West African Conference of 1884–1885, which paved the way for further European involvement in Africa. Without taking up the history of the conference in its entirety, it is nevertheless important to stress some of its key elements and antecedents. The conference took place in Berlin between November 15, 1884 and February 26, 1885. It was summoned and chaired by Germany, and attended by every European power (with the exception of Switzerland) as well as the United States. Among these powers, five were of real influence: France, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, and the International Association of the Congo—an ambiguous body

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(not having any legal representation) which was used by King Leopold of Belgium to mask his colonial ambitions (Crowe 11). The conference and its subsequent outcome—the partition of the African continent—came as a result of both the continuing Industrial Revolution and the great power rivalry among European nations. This partition, they thought, would ease the tensions and quarrels among these nations whose representatives congregated in Berlin to decide the fate of the continent. Beyond the professed rationale for the new imperialism—notably the civilizing mission—the reasons for European colonial enterprise in Africa are easily discernible. Economic constraints and national competition for prestige increased European interest in Africa, and triggered rivalry among these European nations—rivalry exemplified in the race between Henry Morton Stanley (Britain) and Savorgna de Brazza (France) to reach the so-called Stanley Pool in 1880 (Chamberlain 25). Europeans, namely the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French, had established and long maintained trading posts on the coast of Africa between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but were unable to have access to, or control over the hinterland except in the case of South Africa and Angola (Maddox, Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa xi). The British had come very close to possessing a colony in West Africa with the Sierra Leone experiment1 in 1787 when the colony was founded. But in general, British interest in Africa declined somewhat in the years following this embryonic colonial venture. Supposedly, the Niger Experiment of 1841–1842 was the British attempt to expand trade in commodities that would replace the trade in humans (Chamberlain 20–21). Philip Curtin and K.O.Dike argue that, like the Sierra Leone venture, the Niger experiment was also a failure because the expedition suffered heavy mortalities during its activity (Chamberlain 21). But we need to remind ourselves that the experiment was perhaps doomed to fail from the beginning, partly because slave labor was still in existence in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean: as long as there was a demand for slaves, clandestine trade would and did result. Despite the ill-fated Niger experiment, British interest in Africa grew in the 1840s partly as a result of literary publications, mainly travel narratives such as J.Smith’s Trade and Travel in the Gulph of Guinea (1851), whose chapter titles are quite telling: “Human Sacrifice,” “Nailing Prisoners,” “Jack Ketch,” “Decapitation,” “Cooking and Eating Human Flesh,” “King Pepple

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Eats King Amacree’s Heart” (Chamberlain 22). But other forces were equally at work. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an overwhelming expansion of European colonization. In Europe the birth of two nationstates in 1870–1871, Germany and Italy, was among the changes that would later lead to the summoning of the Berlin West African Conference by Bismarck. France and Britain were already great powers and had control over certain regions in Africa soon to be their colonies. Since national prestige was an important factor in European imperialism, nationalists in Germany and Italy felt their countries should also acquire colonies, given that they could afford it financially and militarily. Meanwhile, France had been defeated in the war against Prussia, the dominant state in Germany. To regain prestige and make up for her lost provinces, and to prevent Italy from gaining control of the Mediterranean, France occupied Tunis (Tidy and Leeming 1). In addition, in order to protect their assets in India, the most important part of the British empire, Britain needed full monopoly over the Suez Canal (completed in 1869) and the sea routes around the Cape of Good Hope between Britain and India (Maddox, Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa xii). Consequently, when Arabi Pasha, the Egyptian ruler, was defeated at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, the British government took control of Egypt in 1882. Britain also prevented other European countries from acquiring colonies along the banks of the Nile by occupying the Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya (Tidy and Leeming 1). In central Africa in the 1870s, Portugal, although the weakest European power, began to lay claims on the regions it had had contact with through trade and slavery (Maddox, Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa xii). After the founding of the Society for German Colonization in 1884, Germany created protectorates in Togo, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika (Tidy and Leeming 5). And King Leopold II of Belgium, unable to find support for his colonial endeavors, used his personal wealth to “carve a private empire out of central Africa,” the so-called Congo Free State, later a Belgian colony (Maddox, Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa xii). In the late nineteenth century European awareness of the economic possibilities of Africa also increased. The discovery of the largest diamond and gold fields in South Africa, a region under British control, raised issues of territorial claim (Maddox, Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa xiii). Europeans were also aware of the possibility of, and interested in obtaining through middle men from the interior an

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enormous amount of rubber, ivory, peanuts, and cloves for European markets. Also among the raw materials in demand was palm oil, used in ships’ engines and sewing machines, as well as for the manufacture of soaps and candles (Crowe 12). Thus trade disputes among these European nations became commonplace. Historians Tidy and Leeming relate European militarism to the rivalry that led to the scramble for territory. They contend that since few battles occurred in Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European military officers who aspired to promotion and glory sought it in colonial wars, which were generally less dangerous than wars in Europe due to the lack of modern weapons among Africans and colonial peoples (Tidy and Leeming xx). For instance French military officers such as Bugeaud, Faidherbe, De Brazza, and Gallieni became legendary heroes for having fought colonial wars in Africa. Likewise, Wolseley, Kitchener, and Luggard were British men of arms who led British troops into various African states and communities where they hoisted the Union Jack and became celebrities. The Berlin West African Conference, then, was intended to ease all trade disputes, but later extended to include other topics such as “legal” occupation by European powers of the whole continent. As Maddox has noted in his introduction to Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa, the conference divided up spheres of influence between the interested powers and laid ground rules for annexation. While the image of diplomats in striped pants blithely drawing lines on blank maps with rules and compasses is appealing, spheres of influence generally recognized existing commercial or political interests and final boundaries were usually fixed later. The conference established “effective occupation” as a standard by which claims could be judged that in turn set off the final scramble to establish outposts, collect dubious treaties with presumed African rulers, and build infrastructure such as ports and railroads, (xiii)

With the exception of the United States, all the powers present at the conference signed and approved the final decisions contained in a General Act. The First Basis dealt with the “establishment of freedom of commerce in the basin and mouths of the Congo River”; the Second Basis gave these nations “freedom of navigation on the Congo and Niger”; the Third dealt with “effective [territorial] occupation.” The question of the so-called internal slave trade received lukewarm support and resulted in the “insertion of a vague clause in the final act.”

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The abrogation of liquor traffic was brought up by Britain, but dismissed mainly by Germany on “account of the vested interests” (Crowe 102–03). This is what happened on paper in Berlin, and the fate of the continent was thus decided by representatives of the major powers of the European community (except Switzerland). Ironically the International Association of the Congo present at the conference had nothing to do with an African representative, because there was none (Crowe 5). On the ground, Europeans encountered resistance from African states: smaller states and territories were easily conquered, but the larger ones fought battle after battle mainly between 1870 and 1890. Various African rulers who rejected British rule, for instance, were arrested and deported to other British colonies far from their countries. For instance King Prempeh I of the Ashantis (Ghana), Bai Bureh of Sierra Leone, and Mukama Kabarega of Bunyoro were all deported to the Seychelles,2 where some of them died or were allowed to return only after years in exile, “and after the divide-and-rule principle had deprived [them] of a constituency” (Maddox, The Colonial Epoch in Africa 33–34). This method of banishing African rulers from their people and government was very effective, for the British rapidly filled the political vacuum created by their involuntary absence. The British converted these African leaders to Christianity while they were in exile; some received British education along with their children, since it was thought that Christianity and British education would make the deportees and their offspring more docile than their parents had been (Maddox, The Colonial Epoch in Africa 34). To preface the discussion of Henty’s juvenile books with the Berlin West African Conference is to recall African resistance to the partition; it is also to place Henty’s juvenile books within their historical contexts, since it was African resistance to European (British in this case) domination that provided the site of conflict within which Henty’s novels are inscribed. Thus, the conference and the subsequent African resistance to it are crucial to the critique of Henty’s works, in that these works are based on the “accounts” of the war correspondent that Henty was. Henty covered the Abyssinian campaign, the FrancoGerman war, the Turco-Servian war, the so-called Ashanti and Zulu wars, the Anglo-Boer war, and several other wars mainly involving British interests. It is not surprising that late-nineteenth-century juvenile literature romanticized these imperialist wars after the militarization of the English public schools had been achieved earlier in midcen-

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tury. What, then, are the relations among juvenile literature, imperialist wars, and the public school? ROMANCE AND IMPERIALIST WARS: FROM THE SCHOOL TO THE BATTLEFIELD If imperial conquest on the grand scale could [thus] be encoded in a (Divine) comedy, the campaigns and battles which were its necessary constituent were more often imagined as romance, with the focus on the role of the individual hero…. [T]he central dynamic of romance is dialectical, in the form of a conflict between the hero and his adversaries; the hero’s task, or adventure, is part of a larger quest, which ends with his success and recognition. Again, as in comedy, light triumphs over darkness, virtue over vice, as the hero transcends the limits of the ordinary world. The hero and his people are associated with order, vigor and youth, while the forces opposing him are savages, locked in confusion and darkness. (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 26)

The connection Robert MacDonald makes between imperial wars, games, and romantic adventure is a pertinent one. MacDonald argues in his article “A Poetics of War: Militarist Discourse in the British Empire, 1880–1918” that the public school code of “playing the game” could seem to be incompatible with the realities of war in the trenches. MacDonald tells the story of the military officer who would kick a football toward the enemy line when attacking, just to show the courage of the British (17). But a closer look at the nature of the nineteenth-century public school reveals interesting similarities. From our discussion of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the previous chapter, it is obvious that the public schools taught British boys the necessary patriotism, tools, and ammunition to serve the empire. These public schools, coupled with the Boy Scouts, were paramount in creating the so-called empire-builders, also known as Men of War. Describing a rugby game, Hughes wrote: “My dear Sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be men, and the balls iron” (Tom Brown’s Schooldays 89). Here, Hughes was mak-

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ing a connection between war and sport that was part and parcel of the nineteenth-century public school curricula. Boys would be called to duty in the empire, to fight for and maintain the empire. But, unlike the games played at Rugby, the battle for which the schoolboys were being prepared was a “justified” battle—against the forces of evil, against savages, and against darkness. Though of a previous century, ideologically Crusoe could have been one of Arnold’s students at Rugby. Crusoe was not, and did not become, a colonial military officer but he never forgot his duty as an Englishman, that is, to bring order into an environment where chaos once reigned. The rugbyplaying boys in Tom Brown’s Schooldays became not only the empirebuilders of Henty’s juvenile books, but also British colonial officers such as Baden-Powell, Sir Garnet Wolseley, and General Gordon (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 26) The discourse of playing the game functioned as a discourse of difference: it set the English apart from other nations and nationalities, women, and the underprivileged, and as MacDonald puts it, “at the bottom, the mystique of a code cannot be analyzed by its believers, but only taken on faith. If you do not understand, you do not belong to the privileged group” (19). It follows that, to be a member of the privileged group, one needs to play the game, and that includes the use of the language and iconography of chivalry that describes war in a sacred mode. In juvenile and popular literature, successful fights were called “hot work,” unsuccessful ones were referred to as “desperate work”; soldiers found themselves in “tight spots” and “hot corners.” MacDonald asserts that referring to killing as work, or to danger as tight, had to be read as a “signal in the language of class and gender superiority,” and “to call war a game was the ultimate euphemism, a provocative assertion of caste power” (19). Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, intimated that officers from other countries “envy and admire that spirit of sport and adventure which pervades the British officers as a class…. Many foreign nations have sought to instill the British characteristics into their own manhood, but in doing so they have tried to force that which will not grow naturally,…they cannot get their boys to take to cricket and football and other games that ours take to as naturally as ducklings to water” (quoted in MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 20). Hence games were naturally English, and Englishmen were also the best players.3 While the significance of “militant imperialism was conveyed

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through such topoi as ‘playing the game,’ ideology was activated through narrative”: The plots of war stand at the center of the symbolic order. The framing narrative of imperialism, the ur-plot, was that of conquest: first came the traders and missionaries; the natives resisted or “rebelled”; then came the army to conquer and pacify. Subsequently more settlers arrived, and the country prospered, given the benefits of “civilization”— new crops, a new economy, a new political and legal structure. (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 23)

The war of conquest, supposedly waged for the benefit of humanity, could not have been mean-spirited since it was meant to bring order to a chaotic setting. In Prester John (1910) John Buchan “[strikes] the note of comedie transformation” with these words: “it would do your heart good to see the garden we have made out of the Klein Labongo glen,” says one of the characters in this adventure novel (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 23). The making of this garden required, among other things, the British soldier trained in the public school. There seems to be a close connection between the schoolmaster and rebellious pupil, and the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. On the one hand, the schoolmaster represents the imperial British soldier, and the subjugated, or soon-to-be conquered peoples come close to the disobedient pupil whom the headmaster has the right to discipline through punishment (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 25) The war of conquest was presented to the reader as evidence of British superiority, benevolence, and virility; but it also belonged to the motif of war-as-lesson. In “The Lesson,” Kipling, referring to the Boer War, illustrates this “lesson:” “We have an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!” (quoted in MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 25). This narrative, and the like, belonged to the “symbolic creation of order in the name of English superiority,” and as Sir Charles Napier remarked of Sind, “we have no right to seize [it], yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful and humane piece of rascality it will be” (MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 25). War or conquest as “(Divine) Comedy” rationalizes the barbarous and destructive nature of war; the narrative thus relies on the technique of the romance, and focuses on the role of the individual hero whose “task or adventure is part of a larger quest, which ends with his success and recognition,” and, as in comedy, “light triumphs over darkness, virtue over vice”

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(MacDonald, “A Poetics of War” 26). Thus the building of the British empire relied not only on educational institutions such as the public school, but also on romantic narrative, both of which broadly disseminated imperialist themes and goals. Can we also delineate Henty’s juvenile books as historical novels because they depict actual battles fought between the British and the peoples they later colonized? Some critics such as Crewdson contend that Henty’s works are history texts (Crewdson 97), but Henty’s novels are only historical in the sense that the author uses historical events as background, not in the sense that his accounts of the African people and their traditions are accurate. Although we are told Henty did not transcribe the novels himself, and that for historical information he relied on the London Library, in his novels he always had room to comment on the culture, characteristics, and “personality” of Africans. Was Henty an ethnographer, a historian, or a combination of both? HISTORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND PERSISTENT STEREOTYPES The war story can be viewed as a retelling of a romance by the journalist, historian, novelist, or poet. Henty, the most prolific writer of this genre, was also a journalist, a miner, and, to some critics, a historian. Although William Crewdson had asserted that “those who read [Henty’s] books gained far more knowledge about famous battles and foreign lands than they ever could from a history or geography lesson at school” (97), it is quite easy to dismiss Henty as a historian. Despite references in his juvenile books to wars of conquest, some of which he reported on as a correspondent, Henty had little historical evidence to support his comments on the personalities and cultures of the people he encountered. In the Union Jack, a periodical he edited, Henty boasted that although his aim in writing tales was to entertain, his young readers “may rely upon the information in them to be trustworthy and genuine” (quoted in Butts 6). Contrary to Henty’s claims, Denis Butts asserts in his article “Writing to a Formula: G.A.Henty, Historical Novelist or Reporter?” that Henty’s account of the Peninsular Campaign is not “merely inaccurate in detail—describing British attacks upon Spanish allies which never took place—and in exaggerating the lengths of the journeys marched by the infantry,” but also Henty fails to tell his “lads,” as he calls them, why the French army (despite their

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number and strength) was defeated (Butts 6). As Bhupal Singh points out in A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction, “when history comes into contact with fiction, when fact clashes with fancy and when race prejudice and pride blur the vision, the complexity of the task increases beyond the powers of ordinary story-tellers” (quoted in Butts 6). Butts further describes Henty’s myopic and inaccurate vision of history when he points out that Henty “can think only in terms of racial stereotypes,” and that he “looks at Empire from the point of view of the British officer and settler, and rarely, if ever, from any other viewpoint” (Butts 6). Henty is also viewed by some critics as an ethnographer. In Africa in English Fiction, 1874–1939, G.D.Killam dates ethnographic fiction from 1874, the year of the Wolseley campaign in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) on which Henty based By Sheer Pluck. Killam affirms that Henty did not invent the image of the savage he described in his works, but perpetuated an older one: Addressing themselves to a general public caught up in the enthusiasm of the overseas venture in Africa, they knew what their readers wished to read and to that taste they catered. Thus the generality of authors adhere strictly in their treatments of the African setting to an image of Africa which was in large part formed before they came to write their books, (x)

The British empire did not become the main subject matter for nineteenth-century-fiction writers until travel writers, anthropologists, and historians had laid down the pattern for representing non-Western peoples. Perhaps these travel writers, historians, and anthropologists (ethnographers in particular) thought they had an understanding of the mores and customs of the people they wrote about, but their writings only undermined the integrity of the people and cultures they came into contact with, and perpetuated already-existing biases and myths. In The Savage in Literature, Brian Street points out that a group of scientists began to study the information contained in the travelers’ tales, and as a result the Ethnological Society was founded in 1843. The Society later collected and made available for future travelers information as to what to expect or look for in the course of their travels. Most of these representations or accounts, Street argues, tell more about the Victorian people themselves than about the savages they intend to represent (3). These (mis)representations seem to be the norm among many nineteenth-century European colonizing powers.

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For instance in 1851, the following article was published by the Societé de Géographie de Paris regarding the Niam-Niam people of Central Africa: They all had tails, about forty centimeters long and perhaps two or three in diameter; this organ is smooth; among the cadavers there were those of many women who were formed in the same fashion; aside from this, they were the same as other negroes; they were absolutely naked…. Manuel was in the advance party and saw many of these people killed; he examined the cadavers, measured the tails, and he can conceive of no doubt concerning their existence, (quoted in Miller 4)

The author of this article, Francis de Castelnau, claimed that the information contained in his article came from Manuel, a slave who had previously taken part in a raid on the Hausas into the Niam-Niam territory. The tails (“belonging” to the Niam-Niam) turned out to be “leather ornament[s] representative of tails” (Miller 4). The above quote is a telling example of the limitations of representation; it also attests to the limited knowledge, or lack thereof, of writers describing cultures and people they knew little about. While de Castelnau remains the author of the above article, his misrepresentation of the Niam-Niam could easily be overlooked because he distanced himself from the information by using Manuel as the real witness to people with tails. Manuel’s status (we are told he is a slave) is crucial to the unveiling of de Castelnau’s strategic representation, in that one is led to believe this story coming from a native, (a non-European) rather than from an ethnographer, who could be discredited as being an outsider. The limitations of classical ethnographic writing fashioned after the tradition of “participant observer,” James Clifford argues, has led to experimentation with other forms of ethnographic writing: dialogic ethnography and polyphonic ethnographic writing. The shortcomings of the former lies in the fact that, although there is dialogue between two individuals, the ethnographer still controls the representation of that dialogue. While polyphonic ethnographic writing (inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia) encourages multiple voices and direct quotations, it still remains deficient in that it “confirms the ‘virtuoso orchestration’ of various discourses by a single author” (Spurr 188). Clifford aptly points out that “textual embodiment of authority” remains a problem in ethnographic description and interpretation (54). Hence, Francis de Castelnau, writing from a vantage point

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of authority, (mis)represented the Niam-Niam people because of what Clifford refers to as “multiple subjectivities and political constraints” (25)4 that are beyond his control, although he appoints Manuel to be his mouthpiece. Obviously other types of writing face the same problems found in ethnographic representation. David Spurr argues that, like ethnography, journalistic writing is “a direct response to the experience of a specific cultural or historical actuality,” and thereby may embody cultural and personal biases (189). Oftentimes we tend to think that journalistic writing would be free of bias since it is considered to be a firsthand account of events and situations. The battlefield reports Henty incorporates in his novels do not escape this “virtuoso orchestration of various discourses by a single author” found in journalistic and ethnographic writings. The correlations between the imperial writer, the anthropologist, the ethnographer, and the historian become clear when one notes how they all joined in the empire-building endeavor. Henty might have been fully aware that he was a propagandist, not a historian, when he wrote in The Boys’ Own Paper which he had once edited: To endeavour to inculcate patriotism in my books has been one of my main objects, and so far as it is possible to know, I have not been unsuccessful in that respect. I know that many boys have joined the cadets and afterwards gone into the Army through reading my stories, and at many of the meetings at which I have spoken officers of the Army and Volunteers have assured me that my books have been effectual in bringing young fellows into the Army…. (quoted in Arnold 63)

Patriotism was what Henty inculcated in his books, a prerequisite for the heroes of his fiction. Before we turn to these books, it will be useful to take a glance at both Henty—the favorite boys’ author—and the Henty hero. HENTY: THE FAVORITE BOYS’ AUTHOR Born in 1832 at Trumpington, near Cambridge, George A.Henty was an Englishman whose life spanned the Victorian era. During the late 1800s Henty was among the major promoters of empire expansion and the notion of a white man’s burden. Henty was not only one of the most prolific boys’ authors of the Victorian era,5 he was also one of the earliest and most influential ones. His attitudes and writings reflect “what he considered to be the virtues which had made and would keep

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Britain great” (Arnold 3). In the preface to St. George for England, a novel published in 1885, Henty wrote: “The courage of our forefathers has created the greatest empire in the world around a small and in itself insignificant island; if this empire is ever lost, it will be due to the cowardice of their descendants” (5). Henty was certain that the British empire would forever be the dominant world power. In an interview, he arrogantly stated that his books had “helped to foster the imperialist spirit” (quoted in Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 74). He frequently claims in the prefaces of his novels that his main object is not directed so much toward fiction writing as toward teaching boys history in an acceptable way. His sense of what was acceptable, however, did not stem from historical research, nor even from a credible technique as a historical novelist.6 For the historical and geographical background information that would be inserted into the tales, Henty made use of the London Library and a paid assistant. Henty instructed his helper: “I’ll leave you to yourself today. Boil down the official report of the Battle of So-and-So, or this passage of So-and-So’s book” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 21). Patrick Dunae points out that Henty’s sources were “often biased, even by contemporary standards” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 21 But the young reader had no awareness of biases and inaccuracies. Readers defended him even when they could look back with the benefit of adult hindsight. Responding to a criticism of Henty as a jingoist, Bernard G.T.Hawkes stated in 1908: “I think many young men will be with me when I say that I learnt far more history by reading Mr. Henty’s tales than I ever had crammed into me at school” (Arnold 23). The “knowledge” that such a reader as Bernard Hawkes did acquire was actually a perspective or an attitude about non-English nations as presented by a member of the British upper classes. Henty’s early years were a blend of physical trauma and economic comfort. He was a confirmed invalid at birth and was frequently confined to his bed during his childhood in Canterbury, where his father was a mine owner. He attended a dame school and began reading, in his own words, “voraciously”—romance, adventure, everything he could get his hands on. At ten, he was sent to a London boarding school; at fourteen, he went to Westminster (Arnold 4)7 school; at twenty, he went to Cambridge, but dropped out as he collapsed at the end of his first year following three weeks of intensive study. He retired to his father’s coal mine in Wales, and when he returned to

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Cambridge shortly after, he was offered a job in the Commissariat Department of the army. He left Cambridge for good and for more that twenty years pursued a career as a military man and war correspondent.8 He covered the Abyssinian campaign, the Franco-German War, the Turco-Serbian War, and others for the London Standard. In September of 1873, he followed Sir Garnet Wolseley to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) where he met H.M.Stanley, the famous Victorian explorer sent by the New York Herald to look for David Livingstone (Arnold 4–10). Henty set eight of his adventure stories in Africa including an episode in Through Three Campaigns. These stories cover the Wolseley campaign in the Gold Coast (1873–1874), By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War; the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, fictionalized in A Chapter of Adventures; the expedition to relieve Gordon (1884–1885), The Dash for Khartoum; an expedition in Omdurman (1898), With Kitchener in the Soudan; the so-called Zulu War of 1879 and the first Anglo-Boer War of 1881, The Young Colonists, and the first and second Boer Wars (1899–1902), With Buller in Natal and With Roberts to Pretoria (Arnold 114). One wonders if Henty wrote these novels of empire because he truly believed in an innate superiority of his people or because he set out to make money. William Allan remarks that before writing boys’ books became his career, Henty sought other ways to subsidize his income on the Standard. One way he did it was to recover “tin from broken or disused utensils.” His house was therefore “filled with a bad smell… engendered by efforts to melt off the tin from baser metal with the assistance of a compound of a chemical sort invented by the operator” (Allan 77). Was it the nostalgia of his schooldays and his military career that drove him to write? As I shall show later, his writings reflect the attitudes, anxieties, and aspirations of the Victorian people. But Henty also influenced his society and even encouraged nineteenth-century negative attitudes towards race and gender. The Times obituary notice observed that “Mr. Henty was stiff in opinions, somewhat dogmatic in manner, and lately inclined to liberal views in politics and religion” (quoted in Allan 99). While the majority of Victorians thought that “if any father, godfather, clergyman or schoolmaster is on the look out for a good book to give a boy who is worth his salt, then he cannot do better than turn to Henty,” a handful, such as Dr. Gordon Stables (who also published with Blackie, Henty’s publisher) “noted with repugnance, the presence of that ‘stiff dogmatic old pagan George Henty’“ (Allan 97).

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Some critics praised him as “The high priest of adventure story writers” and “The Boys’ Dumas,” while to some, his stories were too predictable, and always aimed at the upper- or middle-class. While editor of the Union Jack Henty once received a letter from a boy who wanted to know why he published “such rotten articles”! (Crewdson 96). In his George Alfred Henty: The Story of an Active Life George Man ville Fenn, a friend of Henty’s and a contemporary boys’ writer, uncritically lauds his friend’s activities as war correspondent, writer, and soldier. Guy Arnold, a more recent Henty biographer, describes Fenn’s book as a “flat” work about a “recently passed heroic figure for boys and the picture he draws is not unlike that of one of Henty’s own boy heroes in his many novels—though one that takes the story right through death” (Arnold 3). Fenn paints the acceptable image of Henty, but as William Allan points out, “the outlines of Henty’s personality were blurred even in his own lifetime by the character he created for his heroes,” and at the end of his life, he “came to seek in his novels a simplicity and heroism he no longer found in life” (Allan 72). Whether Henty was seeking in his novels the “heroism he no longer found in life,” or believed in the invincibility of the British empire, one thing is certain: through his writings he brought his stone to the edifice of the British empire. THE HENTY HERO Although hero worship has apparently been present as a familiar cultural norm, mostly in Europe, it essentially became a nineteenthcentury phenomenon (Houghton 305). Carlyle refers to it as a “basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind” (123). Nineteenth-century hero worship had its roots in the “cult of enthusiasm, the notion of the superior being, the revival of Homeric mythology, and Victorian nationalism”—nationalism that brought with it the glorification of English heroes, namely those of the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, and the great Elizabethans (Houghton 306–24). In Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire, Wendy Katz notes that “Anglo-German tensions, along with unstable relations with Ireland, India, Egypt and South Africa, had elicited sympathy for the idea of both the heroic man… and an heroic society.” In other words, as Britain seemed to lose control of its colonial possessions, it became expedient to revive the cult of hero worship in order to maintain the

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image of the “greatest empire.” Heroes in literature, Katz maintains, “were imaginary reflections of a society interested in soldiers, athletes, and sheer physical power” (58– 59). Writing at this juncture of Britain’s imperial history, Henty made it a point to endow his heroes with the attributes required to sustain the empire. Henty’s choice of his hero—the imperial hero—is a never-changing one. Oftentimes he is a boy of about fourteen, a son of a widow, middle-class, who had to make his way in the world of adversity, the world of “hostile natives” as A.P.Thornton puts it in his article, “G.A. Henty’s British Empire.” Thornton contends that the heroic emphasis in Henty’s books increased toward the last decade of the nineteenth century to counter the anti-imperialist sentiment during the South African War (99). The heroic emphasis in Henty’s works exemplifies Geoffrey Hartman’s assessment of the hero as a proffered solution to a problem of an era (299), which for the late nineteenth century was the possible decline of the British empire, underscored by increasing antiimperialist sentiment. Henty’s heroes are predictable: early in his juvenile books, he established the “manly,” straightforward type who “could give and take punishment (taking without complaint although more usually he seemed to be giving it), fearless, never lying, [and] resourceful” (Arnold 31). Henty’s “accessible and predictable” heroes invite the reader to “project himself into the character and thereby to take a personal interest not only in the details of battles and campaigns but in the hero’s ultimate success…and the manliness of the hero will become the manliness of the reader” (Nelson 107). Almost all of Henty’s youthful heroes develop strong physiques, probably a detail with autobiographical associations, because as a child Henty was bedridden, but grew up to be “large and powerful” through training in a variety of sports (Arnold 31). Besides providing the hero with an outlet for “the exercise of aggressive impulses” inhibited by an “industrial society located on a small island,” the colony also equips the hero with material possessions such as land, treasure, and commercial benefits (Clark 47). Henty’s apparent approach to wealth in The Young Carthaginian (1887) seems superficially anticapitalist: “With wealth comes corruption, indolence, a reluctance to make sacrifices, a weakening of the feeling of patriotism” (38). Oftentimes, however, Henty’s heroes (after their “ordeals” in the colony, either as soldiers fighting for the cause of their country, or as settlers who become involved in the war of con-

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quest) return with enough money to live happily ever after. For instance in By Sheer Pluck, Frank Hargate, the hero, returns to England with an ample fortune that enables him to attend medical school and to become a high-ranking physician. In fact Guy Arnold, a Henty biographer, contends that although in his juvenile books Henty was inclined to inculcate leadership and “manliness,” as he saw them, he was equally preoccupied with assuring his young readers that his heroes could win fortune, success, recognition, and titles (66). Roy Turnbaugh argues that in Henty’s novels “personal advancement is made to coincide exactly with the demands of duty” (736). Possibly because of his obsession with the greatness of the British empire, his white supremacist views, and his concern that the British empire might disintegrate, Henty sought to impart his belief in the advantages of imperialist enterprise to his young readers. As a consequence, his plots are monotonous, his settings are always the battlefield, and his hero a sort of “‘portrait-robot,’…qui…est un peu toujours le même” [who…is a little redundant].9 The next chapter is a critique of three of Henty’s books set in west and north-east Africa, and based on British military campaigns in the Gold Coast and the Sudan: By Sheer Pluck, The Dash for Khartoum, and With Kitchener in the Soudan. NOTES 1. Blacks (newly freed slaves in the British West Indies and Britain, and those who fought on the British side during the American War of Independence in 1776) were sent to Sierra Leone to settle there. Although this experiment was partially a failure, it played a role in the development of British thinking about the possibilities of a real colony in Africa; see chapter 1 on the Sierra Leone venture. 2. An island off the coast of South Africa used essentially as a prison. 3. Baden-Powell would have been disappointed that the British national football team did not even make it to the 1994 Olympic Games even though they invented the game centuries ago. 4. David Spurr points out in The Rhetoric of Empire that those constraints include the “professionalization of anthropology as a discipline, its coincidence with European colonialism, and its position within universities, museums, and foundations” (188). 5. Out of a record of ninety-four novels published between 1871 and 1906 only about a dozen were written for adults and several for girls including Girl of the Commune and Dorothy’s Double.

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6. Henty scholars point out that he probably never put a pen to a paper. Patrick A.Dunae has provided a vivid picture of his method: “…[he] would recline his massive frame on a sofa and begin to dictate: settings, character sketches, plot outlines… Griffith [his principal assistant], seated stiffly at a desk, would rapidly record the narrative” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 20). Henty once told his interviewers: I do not write any of my books myself. I get a man to do them for me—an amanuensis, of course; it all comes out of my head, but he does all the actual writing. I never see any of my work until it comes to me from the printers in the shape of proof sheets. My amanuensis sits at the table, and I sit near him, or lie on the sofa, and dictate the stories which I publish” (Fenn 316). 7. It is worth noting that Henty’s Westminster days proved to be beneficial to him later in life because it was at Westminster that he took boxing (to defend himself against boys who ragged him after he declared he wrote poetry), rowing, and wrestling. These activities fortified and transformed the sickly boy into a muscular man (Arnold 4). 8. Henty married and had two sons and two daughters. 9. André Rault, in “George Alfred Henty, Romancier de la Jeunesse,” asserts that the model Henty uses for his hero never changes, regardless of the historical events that shape his narrative; see Home, Sweet Home or Bleak House?: Art et Littérature Victorienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985).

CHAPTER 4

To Africa with Henty The Gold Coast and the Sudan

The courage of our forefathers has created the greatest empire in the world around a small and in itself insignificant island; if this empire is ever lost, it will be due to the cowardice of their descendants. —George Alfred Henty

One measure of a society is its ability to instill in its people the willingness to die—for their king, their country, their gods, their honor. This the Asante did, and it is no small achievement that its people were so steadfast for so long. —Robert B.Edgerton

While in the above quote Henty was referring to the British people, Edgerton’s comments suggest the Ashantis’ devotion to, and belief in, their people and empire. Edgerton’s quote could also be used to comment on the Victorian-Edwardian frame of mind regarding the British empire. The longest and most effective resistance to the British conquest of Africa took place on the west coast. Between 1807 and 1900 the Ashantis (Asante) of present-day Ghana fought battle after battle in attempts to maintain their sovereignty and dignity. Needless to say, the British were attracted to the enormous amount of gold that was to be found in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana). When Thomas Edward Bowdich, the scientific observer for the parliament-chartered African Company of Merchants, visited Kumasi in the early nine84

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teenth century and was invited to dine with the Ashanti king, Osei Bonsu, he was highly impressed. He observed: “…dinner was served on a large table under four scarlet umbrellas. The plates were gold, the knives, forks, and spoons were silver.” Later he wrote: “…we never saw a dinner more handsomely served, and never ate better” (quoted in Edgerton 22–23). Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and to the east of modern Ghana, three Empires (Ghana, Mali, and Songhay) rose and fell. The nineteenth-century Ghana bore resemblance to the old empire not only in wealth, but also in military capability and government bureaucracy. When the Portuguese arrived at Elmina in 1471, they became restive at the sight of the “flecks of gold that sparkled in the streams” (Edgerton 14). Europeans from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Prussia in search of gold, ivory, and slaves began to build forts (castles) along the coast. Trade disputes eventually erupted, not only among these European nations, but also between the Ashantis and the Fantis. The Ashantis had previously extended their empire at the expense of other neighboring kingdoms such as the Denkyira, Fante, Dagomba, and Gonja peoples (Edgerton 5). Under auspices of the African Company of Merchants, Thomas Bowdich signed a treaty with King Osei Bonsu, guaranteeing “peace and free trade” (Edgerton 72). The conflicts between the Ashantis and the Fantis stemmed mainly from the latter’s reluctance to grant the Ashantis access to the coast for trade activities. The British took sides with the Fantis (who did not pose any military threat to the British) against the Ashantis. It is worth pointing out that most, if not all, British campaigns in Africa were fought with Black troops from either the West Indian Regiment (British colonies) or Africans from neighboring communities who had been manipulated into fighting on the British side (Edgerton 74). The Wolseley campaign of 1873–1874, on which Henty based By Sheer Pluck, was one of the most thunderous battles between the Ashantis and the British. BY SHEER PLUCK (1884) By Sheer Pluck gives the late-twentieth-century reader a view of how Africans were perceived by Victorians. Henty conveys this through plot, setting, and characterization. Frank Hargate, the protagonist, is a young Englishman, the only son of a military officer and a naturalist who had died fighting in New Zealand when Frank was a little boy.

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Frank loves nature and is determined to take over his father’s occupation later in life. After his mother’s death when he is fifteen, Frank becomes lonely with only his six-year-old sister as companion. He moves to London, and after a few months of job hunting, he meets Mr. Goodenough, an excellent naturalist, who is about to lead an expedition to Africa in search of specimens of natural history. Mr. Goodenough and Frank embark for West Africa, where they eventually take part in the so-called Ashanti Wars of 1873–1874. Frank is, by birth, a gentleman, despite his “want of pocket money” (10). He was never ashamed of his financial situation. Henty wrote: “It was understood… that Frank Hargate’s people were poor,…but I do not believe that a boy is one whit the less liked, or is ever taunted with his poverty, provided he is a good fellow” (9). Henty uses a railway porter Frank meets in London to make his point about the innate gentlemanliness of the British people: “I don’t know how it is, but a gentleman looks like a gentleman, put him in what clothes you will. I could have sworn to your being that if I’d never seen you before. I can’t make it out, I don’t know what it is, but there’s certainly something in gentle blood, whatever you may say about it. Some of my mates are forever saying that one man’s as good as another. Now I don’t mean to say they ain’t as good; but what I say is, as they ain’t the same. One man ain’t the same as another any more than a race-horse is the same as a cart-horse. They both sprung from the same stock, at least as they says; but breeding and feeding and care has made one into a slim-boned creature as can run like the wind, while the other has got big bones and weight, and can drag his two ton after him without turning a hair. Now, I take it, it’s the same thing with gentle folks and working men. It isn’t that one’s bigger than the other, for I don’t see much difference that way; but a gentleman’s lighter in the bone, and his hands and his feet are smaller, and he carries himself altogether different. His voice gets a different tone. Why, Lord bless you, when I hears two men coming along the platform at night, even when I can’t see’em, and can’t hear what they says, only the tone of their voices, I knows just as well whether it’s first-class or a third door as I’ve got to open as if I saw ‘em in the daylight.” (80–81)

Henty’s heroes are all sons of gentlemen and by extension gentlemen themselves. Jeffrey Richards contends that in the nineteenth century, “it was perfectly possible to tell a gentleman by his accent, his physique, his manner, his carriage,” regardless of his clothing. In Henty’s world, he argues, these attributes are not acquired, but in the blood of a select few British men (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile

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Literature 84). This line of thought is made manifest in the porter’s speech on gentlemanliness, which is usually measured against lowerclass manners and the alleged barbarity of the natives. Stereotypes about Africans begin to emerge as the setting shifts from England to the west coast of Africa. While en route, Frank asks the old naturalist if they will hire men in Sierra Leone for their expedition. To this, Mr. Goodenough responds: “‘Certainly not, Frank. The negroes of Sierra Leone are the most indolent, the most worthless, and the most insolent of all Africa’“ (112). After dismissing the idea that Sierra Leonians could be of any help to them, Mr. Goodenough proceeds to give Frank a brief history of the different ethnic groups in West Africa. He describes what he believes is typical: “They are just children. They are always laughing or quarreling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among whites their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.” (117–18)

Henty himself completes this image: The natives of Africa are capable of great exertion for a time, but their habitual attitude is that of extreme laziness. One week’s work in the year suffices to plant a sufficient amount of ground to supply the wants of the family…. For fifty-one weeks in the year the negro simply sits down and watches his crops grow. To people like this time is of absolutely no value. Their wants are few…. Such people are never in a hurry. To wait means to do nothing. To do nothing is their highest joy. (268–69)

Of course, both Mr. Goodenough and the narrator derive their speeches from the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. Frank has received his first lesson on the people among whom he is going to live for some time. This lesson is short but effective as indoctrination, and when his mentor tells him they will pay their respects to the king, Frank retorts: “‘Do you mean to say that there is a king in that

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wretched-looking village?’“ To this, Mr. Goodenough replies: “‘Kings are as plentiful as peas in Africa, but you will not see much royal state’“ (122). Frank not only begins to sense his superiority as an Englishman, but he also begins to see himself as the bearer of the torch of enlightenment to the heart of darkness. Later, when Mr. Goodenough and Frank are on one of their expeditions, the latter perceives no physical difference between a Black baby and a monkey. One day, in pursuit of a butterfly, Frank is unable to find his way back to the rest of the group and comes across a group of baboons carrying off a baby which he mistakes for a baboon since the baby is wearing a string of beads, “the only attire which a Negro child wears until it reaches the age often or eleven years old” (156). Even before this incident, Frank, like all his compatriots, feels he is born entitled to the socalled white man’s burden. It is becoming clear that it will be his duty to civilize the brutes of Africa after Mr. Goodenough has given him an account of the lives of the people. His attitude, if he is to believe what the old man tells him, will be condescending, paternalistic, and racist. This condescension was by no means an exclusively British trait. Henty uses, in By Sheer Pluck, the same assumptions that pervaded European and American thought. History informs us that even White abolitionists in the United States, although they were committed to their cause, seldom believed in equality between Black and White; their commitment was founded on the notion that Blacks should be taken care of—a myth that infected both antislavery and proslavery forces. Henty links American and British experience in his novel by introducing the character, Sam, an ex-slave from the American South. After several weeks in Africa, the protagonists meet Sam, the chief of an unusually tidy village. This encounter is used by the author as proof that what Mr. Goodenough has said about “uncolonized” (uncorrupted) Africans is accurate—that only contact with European culture produces “progress:” “[Frank and Mr. Goodenough] were struck as they approached by the far greater appearance of comfort and neatness than generally distinguish African villages. The plots of plantations were neatly fenced, the street was clean and well kept” (172). The reader, as well as Frank, might be surprised since this type of cleanliness has not been attributed to the African. Everything becomes clear, however, when we learn that Sam was African-born some sixty years earlier in this village and then spent many years in slavery. At seventeen Sam was himself involved in the selling of war captives to English, Portuguese, and Spanish slave traders, but after he was cap-

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tured, he was sent to Cuba. In his attempt to escape, he was resold into slavery in Virginia, but eventually reached Canada through the channels of the Underground Railroad. He resided there for ten years. When Frank and Goodenough meet him, he is back in his African village and is a new man. He has abandoned all his African “savagery,” and his English friends are impressed by this progress, seen in the orderliness of his village. Henty, in these scenes, is subtle in letting us see the “superiority” of the British people, using Sam as his mouthpiece. Sam’s life story becomes crucial in supporting the white-supremacy myth that Henty, by using this device, is implicitly promoting: the inferiority of the Black race is not mere prejudice, but an acknowledged fact among Blacks themselves. The ex-slave tells Frank and Mr. Goodenough that his village, like the other villages in that region, was dirty and filthy when he left it more than fifty years ago: ‘My fader was de chief of dis village, just as I am now, but de village was not like dis. It was not so big, and was bery dirty and bery poor, just like the oder nigger villages’ (175). The village Frank and Mr. Goodenough arrived at that day was relatively clean and rich, thanks to Sam. Through his travels— during which he learned hygiene among other things—Sam was able to reform his village. What Mr. Goodenough was telling Frank about how Africans would “retrograde into a state little above their native savagery” (118) when left on their own becomes credible when Frank hears the old ex-slave’s story. While Africa apparently represented retrogression in Henty’s thought, slavery and colonization represented progress; a defense of slavery is a noticeable feature of this author’s fiction, and, as in a number of nineteenth-century novels, that defense finds expression in the plantation myth. By Sheer Pluck is imbued with this myth—this idealization of master and slave relations. Sam tells Mr. Goodenough and Frank that slavery was not that bad in Cuba, provided one had a good master (which was usually the case, in Sam’s opinion). Few masters were cruel, says Sam, but slaves were lazy: ‘Dose who work well not bad treated, plenty ob food and a piece of ground to plant vegetables and a raise fowl for ourselves’ (179). Sam was never physically abused by his master because he was not lazy, but when his master went home to Spain, the overseer made life difficult for everybody on the plantation: ‘Den de massa go home to Spain, and leab overseer in plantation. Bery bad man dat. Before, if nigger work well he not beaten. Now he beaten wheder he work or not’ (180). Blaming the

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overseer for the brutality on plantations was characteristic of this period; if there happened to be any cruelty, either the slaves were lazy (as was considered natural with the Negro) or the overseer was meanspirited. Besides keeping the white-supremacy myth alive, this lengthy American interlude in By Sheer Pluck is a means to justify a wrong done to a people. Slavery had been abolished prior to the publication of Henty’s book; yet it was used in the narrative to suggest that whites were the people chosen to enlighten an inferior race. It is not surprising that Henty’s works were popular in the United States. The exslave, Sam, compares slavery in the United States with that of Cuba, and his comparison makes the American plantation almost Edenic: “Well, Sir, work bery much de same on plantation in Virginia and Cuba, but the slabe much merrier in ‘Merica…Slabes all treat bery kind, work not too hard. At night dance and sing bery much…. Sam jus’ as happy as man could be. Sometime when der an party, Sam come into the house to help at the table, dat how Sam know how to do tings proper.” (186)

Sam had only two criticisms of Southern slavery: masters left their plantations in the hands of overseers, and slave families were often broken up when plantations changed hands or suffered bankruptcy. But his general assessment was positive. He explains: “Me trabel a good deal, and me tink dat no working people in de world are so merry and happy as de slabe in a plantation wid a good massa and missy. Dey not work so hard as de white man. Dey have plenty to eat and drink,…when dey are sick dey are taken care ob, when dey are ole dey are looked after and hab noting to do. I have heard people talk a lot of nonsense about the hard life of de plantation slabe. Dat not true, sar, with a good massa.” (189)

But if the plantation was the best place for Blacks why did Sam prefer to come back to Africa when he had the choice to live as a free Black in the United States? There are two ways to answer this question. We can argue that either the plantation happiness Sam talks about is a myth, or, as Henty would like us to view it, Sam decided to come back home to Africa in order to impart to his people the knowledge and civilization he had acquired. In the latter case, Sam can be equated with a White missionary going to Africa on his “civilizing” mission;

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the only difference here is that the missionary role is played by an African among his peers. This brings us to the issue of colonization and repatriation of the emancipated Blacks both in England and the New World. Just after the Civil War in the United States, in 1865, a shipload of Bajans emigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (Martin 9). Sierra Leone was appropriated in order for England to relocate its ex-slaves. Henty might have been a colonization advocate in that he has Sam come back to Africa ‘to teach dese poor niggers here de ways ob de white man,…de ways ob de Lord’ (204). The irony is that the ways of the White man—equated here with the ways of the Lord—tend to be the enslavement of other races. Jeffrey Richards, in his critique of the Henty novels about Africa, interprets the interlude about Sam as a case of British ambivalence. On the one hand, Britain took great pride in its own abolition of slavery in the empire and its support of American abolitionists. On the other hand there was an assumption of Black inferiority and of the need for constant supervision of Blacks (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 94–95). Henty’s abrupt switch to a proslavery position, says Richards, was probably the result of Britain’s new status in Africa as a colonial power, and the developing class hierarchy within England as industrialization accelerated (95). But whatever the reasons, Henty’s position in the 1800s seems clear. He returns repeatedly in Sam’s story-within-a-story to the alleged benefits of the American slave system, and in his novel With Lee in Virginia (1890), he concludes with an explicit, unambivalent political message: A few [liberated slaves] wandered away, but their places were easily filled; for the majority of the freed slaves very soon discovered that their lot was a far harder one than it had been before, and that freedom so suddenly given was a curse rather than a blessing to them. (384)

Besides his usefulness in Henty’s appraisal of slavery, Sam provides a means of commenting upon African personality, of perpetuating another invalid assumption. When Sam returns to his village, he persuades the people to keep the village clean by promising them goods he has obtained in the New World. Like a child, the African does not want to take any responsibilities unless he or she is promised gifts! Europeans have always claimed that Black people lacked responsibility and initiative. This can be seen in the manner in which Frank

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interacts with the Ashantis. In By Sheer Pluck, Frank and Mr. Goodenough were guests of the Ashanti king before the war broke out. When Mr. Goodenough dies, Frank is held captive by the Ashantis and forced to fight on their side against the British. It is then that he becomes friend and adviser of the Ashanti war general Ammon Quatia. The Ashantis are taken by surprise by the Fantis one day when everybody is asleep, including the general. When the guards wake up, they are confused and do not know what to do. It is Frank who helps save the troops: ‘The guards had been standing irresolute, not knowing what side to take, but the example of the young Englishman decided them. They fired their muskets…’ (195). Frank, who had never had any military training and was, at that time, about seventeen, takes the initiative in driving the enemy away. This is another indication in the novel that Blacks need supervision, since whatever their age, they are childlike and incompetent. Frank’s astuteness, on the other hand, so impresses the Ashanti war general that the youth is given a valuable gold necklace. The Gold Coast was attractive to many European colonial forces because of its wealth in gold, and this was one of the driving forces behind the atrocities perpetrated against Africans and other peoples. This quest for riches is obliquely presented in the story. After Frank and the British troops have driven the inhabitants from an Ashanti town, they proceed to search all the houses, especially those of the chiefs. They conclude that the Ashantis have no knowledge of comfort or luxury (“the houses were filled with dust and litter”), but they nevertheless find valuable things to appropriate: gold masks, silver plates, gold cups. Moreover, “it was believed that a large amount of treasure was located at the kings tombs, and the prize-money would not have been unwelcome” (250). While the wealth of Africa was coveted, so-called backwardness was derided. For example, lack of mechanical know-how was a topic introduced into By Sheer Pluck as comic relief. This subject was developed into a slapstick scene of the type already well known to the nineteenth—and early—twentieth-century audiences through vaudeville and the minstrel theater. Mr. Goodenough promises the denizens in an African village that the White man will show them strange things if they can control their excitement and screams. At night Mr. Goodenough shows slides, some with an elephant bearing men on its back. Some of the villagers, thinking these men are real, leap to their feet and seize their spears to fight, while the women

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scream. The next day, Mr. Goodenough again invites the people; with a small but powerful battery, he arranges the wires attached to it and places them into the hands of two men in the circle Mr. Goodenough instructs them to form. He tells them he will clap his hands and they all have to jump up. Frank then turns on the battery; with a loud and wild shriek, the two hundred men and women leap to their feet and roll backward on the ground. They all flee to the woods immediately with the exception of the chief who calls them back, although he evidently does not understand himself why his people took to the woods. The basic idea of providing “humor” at a child’s level of appreciation is seen here, as well as another method of giving young readers a sense of superiority over the technologically uninformed villagers. In terms of style Henty could easily influence the mind of the child because of elements of romanticism in his works. In order for the young reader to identify with the hero, Henty makes sure that the hero has an ample fortune and an enviable future (Arnold 47). Frank comes back to England to study medicine; Mr. Goodenough, in his will, leaves him a sum of fifteen hundred pounds, and the Ashanti general’s gift—the gold necklace—is worth a thousand pounds. Thus Frank is able to pay for his schooling, and becomes one of the nation’s highranking physicians. Guy Arnold sums up Henty’s role as a writer of empire: [Henty] was a propagandist—for empire and British interests…. He held very strong views he wanted to get across and achieved a high success in doing so through the medium of his boys’ books. Such views were not incidental to the story; as Henty often claimed, he set out to instruct as well as amuse. His books were still to be found on school shelves fifty years after his death and at least some of the racial arrogance which, unhappily, has been so marked a characteristic of British behaviour in what is now termed “Third World” can be attributed to his influence. (81)

THE DASH FOR KHARTOUM (1891) Henty’s predictable plots give way, somewhat, to a more complex one in The Dash for Khartoum. About the book, Guy Arnold writes: The Dash for Khartoum is vintage Henty and the book has everything: a moral; two equally splendid dashing heroes; a Gilbertian opening with mixed up babies; a section on school life and attitudes to it; a near tragedy; a good historical account of the hopelessly late expedition sent

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to rescue Gordon; strictures on the incompetence of the government of the day; and some advanced racial views. (146)

Henty himself moralized his young readers in the preface: The moral, such as it is, of the two lads brought up as brothers is— Never act in haste, for repentance is sure to follow…. Therefore, when you are in serious trouble always go to your best friend, your father, and lay the case frankly and honestly before him; for you may be sure that present displeasure and even punishment are but small things in comparison with the trouble that may arise from trying to get out of the difficulty in other ways. (6)

The Dash for Khartoum is based on the expedition to relieve General Gordon. The events that led to the British expedition in the Sudan began in 1881 when, on a small island in the White Nile, a thirtyseven-year-old Sudanese man named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Expected Guide sent by the Prophet to free his people from Egyptian and British domination (Bond 281). Prior to the conquest and commerce that brought Egyptians, Turks, Arabs, and Circassians to the region, the original Sudanese people had essentially been herdsmen and fishermen. When Charles Gordon, who “sheathed his sword in the Bible and drew it to smite evil with a dogmatic vengeance,” arrived in the Sudan as governor of the Equatoria in 1873, he began work to eradicate the slave trade that once gave economic power to Muhammad Ahmad in order to encourage and control other trade ventures (Bond 282). Consequently Gordon’s efforts to abolish the slave trade in the region coincided with the British government’s monopoly on ivory, fueling tensions between the Sudanese and British governments (Bond 282). Beginning with the fall of El Obeid in 1883, the Madhi, Muhammad Ahmad, expelled all “infidels” from the Sudan, and appealed to the emperor of Ethiopia and Queen Victoria to submit to the “true” faith. In a battle the British would prefer to forget, the Madhists crushed an Egyptian army of about ten thousand men including General William Hicks and his British officers. By April 1884, Darfur and the region of Bahr al-Ghazal were “(re)conquered,” and in January 1885, the Madhists reclaimed Khartoum when General Gordon was killed (Roy Lewis 30–31). The city of Khartoum had been considered by the Madhists as a symbol of alien domination and Egyptian power upheld by European and American imperialists who eventually recon-

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quered the city in 1895 (Roy Lewis 139). The campaign to avenge Gordon’s death was taken up by Henty in his With Kitchener in the Soudan—a sequel to The Dash for Khartoum. Here are the highlights of the story: Captain Clinton is on duty in India, where Mrs. Clinton gives birth to a baby boy. But because she becomes ill her baby is placed under the care of Mrs. Jane Humphreys, a sergeant’s wife who is also the mother of a baby boy of about the same age. Jane deliberately mixes up the babies with the intention that hers could be heir to Captain Clinton’s large fortune. Since there is no way of telling which baby is theirs, the Clintons decide to raise the two boys, with hopes that in due time they may be able to tell them apart. Mrs. Humphreys is pleased that her baby is entitled to a good education and the fortune, but when she is separated from her husband she becomes vindictive. The boys, Edgar and Rupert, at sixteen, know nothing about the incident until they both are at Cheltenham public school back in England. One day, Jane shows up at Cheltenham, takes Edgar aside and reveals to him that he is not a member of the Clinton family. Meanwhile the Clintons are unable to identify their son; they therefore resign themselves to raising them as though they really have two sons, but decide they will tell them the entire story one day before they know it from an outside source. Jane Humphreys confides in Edgar after her attempts to identify her own son fail: “‘I sacrificed myself for your sake…. I had them both, and it seemed hard to me that my boy should grow up to be a boy of the regiment, with nothing better to look forward to than to enlist in it some day, while the other, no better in any respect than him, should grow up to be a rich man, with everything the heart could desire, and I determined that he should have an equal chance with the other…. It was terrible for me to give you up altogether, but I did it for your good…. Your father treated me badly, and I had to leave him and come home to England. But my comfort has all along been that I had succeeded; that you were being brought up as a gentleman, and were happy and well cared for’“ (52). Outraged, Edgar runs away from school and enlists in the army, unwilling to comply with Jane Humphreys’ demands that Rupert be disinherited by Edgar claiming he, not Rupert, is the real son of captain Clinton. In a letter he writes to Rupert, Edgar explains his decision: “‘Perhaps some day when I have made myself a name—for I have no right to call myself Clinton, and I won’t call myself by my real name—I may see you again’“ (55). Later, while on duty in the

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Sudan, Edgar is captured and becomes a slave to the sheik. The search for Edgar does not abate, and eventually Rupert (who also joins the army and is later sent to the Sudan to relieve General Gordon) finds and frees him. The family reunion occurs in England after Edgar and Rupert retire from the army and journey back home, but the question of the real heir to Captain Clinton’s fortune remains unresolved. Beside the moral of the story, The Dash for Khartoum focuses on all-too-common images and representations in colonial discourse: the military might (superiority) of Britain, her economic interests disguised as a blessing to the conquered peoples, Christian doctrines as seen through a Victorian lense, a proslavery argument, British ambivalence vis-à-vis the slave trade, and above all the gentlemanliness of the British. Although Henty was never critical of British imperialist endeavors in Africa and elsewhere, he was, on this occasion, quick to criticize not the “duty” of the British but the government’s hesitant response to the crisis in the Sudan: the expedition to relieve General Gordon in the Sudan came too late and Gordon lost his life in the line of “duty.” Many people in sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century were probably unaware that European colonizers had an agenda that differed from that of spreading the Gospel. Today, even though they are cognizant of the nineteenth-century missionary and colonial agenda, the majority of the people have not discarded the Bible, probably because they have come to understand that the Bible could be put to a better use or interpreted differently. Had the British been seriously concerned with spreading the Gospel, they would have done so during their first encounter with the peoples of Africa—an encounter that turned into the Atlantic Slave Trade during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Because the discourse of the “salvation of souls” gave the impression of moral superiority, the British used it as a means to get their hold on much of the continent. But in northern and northeastern Africa, where Islamic control preceded European imperialism, it was the alleged Islamic fanaticism and tyranny and British people’s belief in their own race superiority that accounted for British conquest. In The Dash for Khartoum, when the Madhi and his people take Khartoum, the British are forced to retreat, but to “retire now would be to leave the whole Soudan in the hands of the Madhi and his fanatics” (218). “It would mean,” Henty wrote, “the destruction of the settled government established by the Egyptians, and it would expose

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Egypt to incessant invasions, which we should be bound to repel” (218). It is as though the British had no interest in the matter, when we know that Sudanese annihilation of Egypt would have been detrimental to British colonial possessions in Egypt. In fact, according to Henty, Gordon was sent by the British government to “restore peace and order to the Soudan” (262). It could be argued that whatever disorder there was in the Sudan, it prevented and threatened British trade in commodities such as ivory. In The Dash for Khartoum, Henty represents Islam with relative respect and open-mindedness, but has no patience for the alleged fanaticism of the Arabs. Evidence of this is found in a conversation between Edgar Clinton (who is now in captivity) and Amina, his captor’s wife: “Well, well, it will be as Allah chooses. You do not believe in Allah, Muley [Edgar’s slave name], you are a Kaffir.”

“I beg your pardon”, says Edgar, “we and you worship the same God. We call him God, and you call him Allah; but it is the same. Your prophet acknowledges Moses and Christ to be prophets. The only difference between us is that you believe Mohammed was a prophet, and the greatest of all, while we do not acknowledge that, but in other respects there is no great difference between us.” (298) The discourse of saving “heathen” souls (conversion) is reversed in The Dash for Khartoum. Here, it is the sheik who tries to convert Edgar to Islam. Again through Edgar, we see that the British acknowledge the legitimacy of Islam and respect it. The sheik offers to adopt Edgar if the latter is willing to convert to Islam: “‘Honourable men do not change their religion for profit, sheik,’“ says Edgar. “‘You were born a follower of the prophet, I was born a Christian. We both believe what we were taught as children; it is in your blood and cannot be changed. Were I to say the words that would make me a Mohammedan, you know well that I should say them with my lips and not with my heart, that I should be a false Mohammedan as well as a false Christian. I could as easily change the colour of my skin as my religion, and you in your heart would be the first to condemn and despise me did I do so’“ (323). One wonders how Christianity is in Edgar’s blood, and if so, why did the British believe they could annihilate the heathenism that presumably was also innate in Africans? Edgar points out later to the sheik—who maintains that the Egyptians were defeated because there was nothing they could do “against

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the followers of Allah”—that “it was a matter of race rather than religion” (343) because the Egyptians, like the Sudanese, are also followers of the Prophet. Edgar argues that the Egyptians and Sudanese are of distinct races, probably because being a product of Victorian England, Edgar is unable to attribute the defeat of the Egyptians to anything but race. He points out to the sheik, his captor: “I admit the extraordinary bravery of the tribesmen. I fought against them at Suakim and saw them charge down upon our square at Abu Klea. They had no fear of death, no men ever fought more bravely. But it is a matter of race rather than religion. Your people have always been free, for the rule of Egypt was after all a nominal one. The Egyptians have been slaves for centuries and have lost their fighting power. In the old, old days, thousands of years ago, of which we have records in our sacred book, and which we have learned from other sources, the Egyptians were among the most warlike of people,…but for many hundred years now they have been ruled by strangers. It was not very long ago that our people fought a great tribe in the south of Africa—a tribe who knew nothing of Allah, who had in fact no religion at all…. It is a matter of race.” (343)

Edgar’s comments deserve our attention. First, it seems that Edgar measures the greatness of the Egyptians by the fact that in the old days they were “among the most warlike of people,” and not by their achievements such as the building of one of the greatest and first civilizations on earth, or the architects of the pyramids. In fact Wilcox, a British soldier, is disappointed the first time he sees the pyramids. “‘It is a big lump of stone, isn’t it?’ says Wilcox, ‘…the chaps who built that must have been very hard up for a job. When I first saw it I was downright disappointed. Of course I had heard much about it, and when we got here it wasn’t half as big as I expected’“ (150). Secondly, the assumption that because the people of southern Africa were neither Christians nor Muslims they had no religion is indicative of Henty’s racist views toward the people of southern Africa. It also reveals the myopic Victorian view that anything that is not monotheistic is “no religion at all.” Thirdly, it is ironic that Edgar, now made a slave by the sheik, realizes that it was slavery that had weakened the Egyptian fighting power. Perhaps by appealing to the sheik thus, he expects to be set free, but the irony lies in the fact that European enslavers had always considered slavery as a blessing when it came to Africans! Edgar is not just a slave; he is a White slave. He is valued by the

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sheik and his wife because he brings with him the “wonders” of the British people to cure an eight-year-old girl who is dying of fever. When a Black slave spits on Edgar he fights back, and when the matter is brought before Amina, she reprimands the rest of the slaves: “The white man is my slave, and if anyone insults him I will have him flogged until he cannot stand. He is a Hakim, and his medicines have saved the life of Hamid’s child. He is worth a hundred of you” (253). The sheik is equally pleased with his slave: “My capture was indeed a fortunate one, Amina. Never did I see men work as they have done this afternoon” (289). When Edgar expresses the desire to go back to his people, the sheik is angered, since he has always treated Edgar not as a slave but as a son. Edgar convinces him that there is no place like home: “‘Not ungrateful, sheik, for you and your wife have treated me with great kindness; but it is natural that one should wish to go to one’s people. Had you been taken a prisoner and carried to England, however well you were treated you would sigh for your free life in the desert…. It is human nature to love the land where one was born, whatever that land may be’“ (346). Contrary to this statement, and to British attempts to abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade, Edgar offers to buy Yussuf (a Sudanese slave belonging to the sheik) whenever he is capable of doing so, that is, when Edgar could buy his own freedom, because he knows Yussuf to be a valuable slave. But Henty cleverly manipulates the plot of the story to suggest Yussuf s unwavering willingness to serve Edgar: when he finally buys Yussuf and decides to free him, the latter wants nothing short of his servitude to Edgar. In other words, although Edgar had argued earlier against his own enslavement, he has no choice but to own Yussuf who is willing to be his slave. One is led to conclude that Henty’s stance is to uphold the myth of the happy slave, the myth that slaves preferred the plantation (slavery) to freedom. Yussuf could not possibly be happier when he is told that he is now Edgar’s property: “The negro threw himself on his knees in an ecstasy of delight and poured out his thanks” (377). When Edgar suggests that he remain among his people and that he would help him start a business, Yussuf strongly objects: “‘No, my lord, none of these things. I would go with you and be your servant; I will never leave you’“ (378). In short slavery is portrayed as a blessing to Yussuf who apparently prefers a White master to his former Sudanese master and to freedom. Blood or race is what constitutes the foundation of British imperialism, and manifests itself in many instances in The Dash for Khartoum.

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It is what accounts for the alleged superiority of the British people exemplified in their alleged gentlemanliness. Jane Humphrey’s machinations (the mixing up of the babies) are motivated by her concern that her son should grow up to be a gentleman, of a higher social class than his parents. Henty created numerous instances in the novel to show the importance of class in nineteenth-century Britain. For instance, although Jane’s intentions behind her scheme are to make a gentleman of her son, she feigns ignorance until her husband bursts out in anger: “‘Well, you have got the trouble of the child off your hands, you have got the knowledge that it will be well taken care of and provided for and made a gentleman of” (24). She later admits to Edgar that she has sacrificed her own desires in order for Edgar to be “brought up as a gentleman” (52). When Edgar runs away from school, his brother Rupert and fellow friends are convinced that he will succeed even if he emigrates. Easton agrees that Edgar “‘is pretty safe to make his way,…that whatever he is doing he will always be a gentleman’“ (76). The officer who enlists Edgar as a trumpeter (because at seventeen he is too young to be in the regular infantry) notices his upbringing when he says, “‘the boy is a gentleman all over, though he has rigged himself out in those clothes’“ (89). In fact, one might say that gentlemanliness is in his blood: he distinguishes himself at cricket, and many officers wonder “what school he came from;” the fact “that he was a gentleman by birth nobody doubted,” since “all the cavalry regiments contain a considerable number of gentlemen in their ranks” (98). Edgar is a true Henty hero: he defends a wounded comrade, a man who, earlier, has been antagonistic toward him. He receives an ovation from the officers, and is even recommended for the Victoria Cross for his bravery. A sergeant remarks to him: “‘If you don’t mount up after all that will be your own fault. You have every advantage. The fact that you have been a gentleman is in your favour…’“ (132). Heroism and gentlemanliness are characteristics of the public school education system. When Edgar joins the military service and shows his prowess at cricket, all the senior officers begin to wonder about him. To the question, “‘Well, Smith [referring to Edgar], how do you like soldiering?’“ Edgar answers: “‘I like it very well; I don’t think that there is anything to complain of at all’“ (98). The sergeant adds: “‘It is better than grinding away at Latin and Greek and mathematics, and that sort of thing’“ (98). The comradeship one finds in the public school is likened to the one in the military since both institutions require “gen-

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tlemanly” character. Edgar “found these big men very pleasant and cheery companions. All had been picked for the service as being men of exemplary character; they were in high spirits at the prospect of the expedition before them, and were like a party of great school-boys out on a holiday” (156). The relation between the school and active military life is made evident by Rupert’s observation that “‘a fellow who could play an uphill game of football as [Edgar] could, can be trusted to keep his courage up under any circumstances’“ (225). The alleged superiority of the British people, which Henty attributes to race, is manifested not only in their gentlemanliness, but also in the so-called duty to civilize the Other. The equation is simple: to civilize already implies the existence of savagery that has to be rooted out. Thus, the Madhi and his followers in The Dash for Khartoum are portrayed as fanatics, implying they need Britain to restore “peace and comfort to the population of Soudan” (342). As Easton remarks, it will be a “‘dishonourable action…to abandon a town of twenty thousand inhabitants to these fanatics…. Our fathers used to be proud to call themselves Englishmen, but by Jove, there is very little reason for us to be’“ (279). Being Englishmen entitles them to being “masters of the place,” and as masters, they are “bound to protect the natives from these savage tribes who are attacking them down on the Red Sea and up the Soudan” (105). The narrator compares the bravery of the Arabs in The Dash for Khartoum to that of the Zulus in The Young Colonists, but insists both peoples are savages: “‘The Zulus were savages, and they made a pretty tough fight against us. I suppose you don’t want anything much harder than that. These fellows [Arabs] have been every bit as brave as the Zulus. They cut Hicks Pasha’s army into mincemeat, and they have licked two Egyptian armies down in this neighbourhood,’“ remarks a sergeant (118). Edgar, who is aware of the fighting capabilities of the Madhists, cautions: “‘You will understand when you see it…. They run pretty nearly as fast as a horse can gallop, and they don’t even fear death in the slightest, for they believe that if they are killed they go straight to heaven. It seems to me that savages must be braver than civilized soldiers. It was the same thing with the Zulus, you know, they came right down on our men at Isandula, and the fire of the breechloaders did not stop them in the slightest’“ (157). What is interesting in Edgar’s observation is that while British civilization and superiority were built on their fighting power and their courage, the

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Zulus and the Arabs are still savages, no matter how courageous and brave they might be. Since the Arabs are portrayed as savages, their saviors—the British —must possess the qualities of superior beings. On seeing the disguise Rupert has to wear to conceal his British identity while he looks for his brother, Edgar, his guide exclaims: “The whites are great people,… they can turn a white man into black. They can put an Arab’s hair on to their heads, so that they can take it on and off like a turban’“ (285). These “superior” qualities, which are supposedly unique to the British, give Edgar the opportunity to become an adviser to the sheik, his captor. In fact the “sheik is so proud of his possession that he did not hesitate to say that their successful defense was chiefly due to the advice of his slave, whom he described as being, although so young, a great captain” (320). In this book, the alleged savagery of the natives, not heathenism, primarily justifies their conquest and domination. Nevertheless, Henty reveals the economic underpinnings of British colonial wars: “‘I have heard,’“ says an officer, “‘from some of our chaps who fought in the Indian mutiny, that they often found a lot of money and jewels and things in those loin-cloths of the Sepoys…. But I do not suppose many of these Arabs ever saw a gold coin in their lives. They don’t see many silver ones…. If you are fighting here for a year you will get nothing except a few worthless charms, of no value whatever…’“ (158). Again, economic motives underscored British colonial enterprise, but the colonial discourse requires a representation that focuses on the alleged inferiority of the indigenous peoples and the need for enlightenment. The British lost this round of fighting in the Sudan, and the expedition to rescue Gordon proved futile—coming too late. WITH KITCHENER IN THE SOUDAN (1903) With Kitchener in the Soudan was published after Henty’s death in 1902, and tells the story of the reconquest of the Sudan after the defeat of the British army at El Obeid in 1885 (Arnold 117). Gladstone wrote a tribute to commemorate the reconquest of the Sudan. After all, it was his failure to send British troops in time that led to the defeat and the withdrawal of the troops in 1885. He wrote: The long and glorious defense of the town of Khartoum will always fascinate the historian. That one man, a European among Africans, a

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Christian among Mohammedans, should by his genius have inspired the efforts of 7,000 soldiers of inferior race, and by his courage have sustained the hearts of 30,000 inhabitants of notorious timidity, and with such materials and encumbrances have offered a vigorous resistance to the increasing attacks of an enemy who, though cruel, would yet accept surrender, during a period of 317 days is an event without parallel in history, (quoted in Bond 284)

Henty’s response to the reconquest of the Sudan is the content of With Kitchener in the Soudan. In the preface, he laid out a dubious motive of the campaign: Thus a land that had been turned into a desert by the terrible tyranny of the Madhi and his successor was wrested from barbarism and restored to civilization, and the stain upon British honour caused by the desertion of Gordon by the British ministry of the day was wiped out. It was a marvelous campaign—marvelous in the perfection of its organization, marvelous in the completeness of its success, (vi)

After the defeat of the British at El Obeid in 1885 and the consequent death of Gordon, Herbert Kitchener—who had devoted part of his military career to training a new Egyptian army—was appointed “Governor of the Eastern Sudan and the Red Sea Littoral,” known to be the last British outpost in the region (Bond 285–86). As Cyril Falls argued, the reconquest of the Sudan was motivated by several factors including the Italian defeat at Adowa by the Ethiopians in 1896, the French infringement on the upper regions of the Nile, and the fact that “the humiliation of the failure to relieve Gordon, or avenge his death, was not forgotten by soldiers such as Kitchener” (Bond 286). The reconquest might also have been encouraged by the “missionary zeal” of Alfred Milner’s book England in Egypt published in 1893. The British success in occupying the Sudan was also due to the Egyptian army which, after its defeat by Wolseley in 1882, allied itself with the British. On January 19, 1899, Sir Reginald Wingate, Kitchener’s successor as governor-general of the Sudan, established an “AngloEgyptian condominium over the Sudan” (Bond 286–306). In With Kitchener in the Soudan, Gregory Hillard Hartley is dispossessed for marrying a woman below his class, a clergyman’s daughter. Partly because of Annie Hartley’s health problems (she would get better in a warmer climate) and partly because Gregory is unable to get “literary work” in London, the young couple go to Egypt where he finds employment as a clerk. In order not to dishonor the family name

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(Gregory’s paternal uncle is an earl), he drops his surname and becomes Gregory Hillard. He later joins the army and goes on General Hicks’s expedition, and is missing in action. Annie brings up their only son, named after his father, in Egypt, and entertains hopes that her husband will return one day. The son is fluent in Arabic and other Sudanese languages; when Gregory is sixteen, Annie’s deteriorating health worsens and she dies. Before her death, she advises her son to join General Kitchener on his expedition to the Sudan. But Gregory is also charged with a mission: to uncover the circumstances of his father’s death—a quest that constitutes a story within the story. Just before the reconquest of the Sudan by British troops, he finds his deceased father’s diary in which he discovers he is heir to the earldom. With his devoted servant, Zaki, he journeys for the first time to England to claim the title and the inheritance. Besides Victorian attitudes to race generally found in Henty’s books, With Kitchener in the Soudan reveals class issues which parallel the author’s racist views toward the Sudanese people. And, while historically British control of Egypt and the Sudan was a move to protect British colonial possessions and trade, in Henty’s fiction the Sudanese people’s alleged fanaticism, barbarism, and inferior status in the Great Chain were cited as the motives for their subjugation. The hero joins the army for two reasons: to make a living and to learn about the circumstances of his father’s death. He fulfills both objectives when he finds his father’s diary—while in the army—which reveals he is the only living heir to the inheritance of which his father was deprived years earlier. Mr. Hartley Hillard’s decision to emigrate to Alexandria (Egypt) is suggestive of Britain’s colonial ambitions motivated by socio-economic uncertainties, since the colony provides Mr. and Mrs. Hartley with the opportunity to envision life beyond his literary career on which the family is unable to make a living. The colony also gives them the occasion to escape class constraints and live a peaceful life where no one could scorn Gregory, nephew of an earl, for working as a porter. In With Kitchener in the Soudan the hero, unfamiliar with Victorian society and norms, inquires from a British officer about the avenues open to the youth in England: “Is it easy for anyone who has been well educated, and who is a gentleman, to get employment there [England]? I mean some sort of appointment, say, in India or the West Indies.” “Easy,…. If a fellow is eighteen and has had a first-rate education

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and a good private coach, that is a tutor, he may pass through his examination either for the army, or the civil service, or the Indian service…. Suppose, finally, you don’t get in; that is to say, when you are two-andtwenty, your chance of getting any appointment whatever in the public service is at an end.” (318)

Gregory knew that his father had come out to Alexandria when he was above twenty-five, but now realizes that his father could not have made it on his own without emigrating to the colony. Gregory may have realized that life is not as easy in England as he might have thought. He asks the officer what other openings there are for a man who fails altogether. The officer shrugs his shoulders and says: “Well, as far as I know, if he hasn’t capital he can emigrate, that is what numbers of fellows do. If he has interest he can get a commission in the militia, and from that possibly into the line, or he can enlist as a private for the same object. There is a third alternative, he can hang himself. Of course, if he happens to have a relation in the city he can get a clerkship, but that alternative, I should say, is worse than the third.” “And no amount of energy will enable a man of, say, four-andtwenty, without a profession, to obtain a post on which he could live with some degree of comfort?” “I don’t think energy would have anything to do with it. You cannot drop into a merchant’s office and say ‘I want a snug berth out in China,’ or ‘I should like an agency in Mesopotamia.’ If you have luck, anything is possible; if you haven’t luck, you ought to fall back on my three alternatives—emigrate, enlist, or hang yourself.” (318–319)

The hero’s father goes through the first two alternatives: he emigrates, enlists, and although he does not hang himself he does lose his life. The hero, arguably, begins to appreciate his father the more he learns about England, for he adds: “‘I had no idea it was so difficult to make a living in England, or to obtain employment, for a well-educated man of two-or three-and-twenty’“ (319). Evidently, going to the colony has nothing to do with “saving heathen souls,” but saving the British themselves. As expected, the reconquest of the Sudan is presented in this book as beneficial to the people of the Sudan. It is also evident from the above passages that, because not all could afford a first-rate schooling with a tutor, the avenues open to Henty’s lads are limited to the selected few. According to Jeffrey Richards, although “gentlemanliness is what distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon race from other races, it is not given to all, only the elite” (Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 76). A character in By

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Sheer Pluck articulates this position: “‘I don’t know how it is, but a gentleman looks like a gentleman, put him in what clothes you will,’“ implying that one has to be born into this class of gentlemen. Yet, there is an indication in The Dash for Khartoum that one can still aspire to become a gentleman through a good education. For instance, Jane Humphreys tries to alter the fate of her son—although in a dishonest way—by mixing up her baby with that of the Clinton’s. Gregory’s inquiries from the officer throw light on middle-class concerns of the Victorian people. Henty seems to be asking the question “‘How does one aspire to a better life?’“ With Kitchener in the Soudan offers three alternatives (emigration, military service, suicide), the third of which (hanging oneself) must be a Henty joke. In fact most of Henty’s writings on the British empire favor emigration, which connotes colonization. Since his heroes always go back to England after acquiring material wealth, we are led to conclude that colonization is aimed at nothing but exploitation. The officer in With Kitchener in the Soudan puts it plainly when he tells the hero that it is difficult to make a living in England: “‘My dear Hillard, that is the problem that is exercising the minds of the whole of the middle class of England with sons growing up. Of course men of business can take their sons into their own offices and train them to their own profession; but after all, if a man has four or five sons, he cannot take them all into his office with a view of partnership. He may take one, but the others have to make their own way somehow’“ (319). Class constraints force the hero’s father (also named Gregory) to drop his last name in order not to dishonor it. Before he takes the clerical job that will take him to Alexandria, he tells Annie, his wife: “I will take another name. Fortunately I have a second one, which will do very well. Hillard will do as well as Hartley; and as I never write it in full as my signature, no one would recognize it as my name. There is nothing to be ashamed of in accepting such a post. As for the marquis, as he has never been friendly with us, it does not matter; he is, I have heard, a very tough sort of man, and my father is not likely to survive him. But I do not think it would be fair to Geoffrey [Gregory’s older brother], when he comes into his peerage, that anyone should be able to say that he has a brother who is a porter in a mercantile house at Alexandria.” (14)

Annie thinks it is disgraceful for Gregory to take such a job. Although

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it is Annie’s social status that causes Gregory to be disinherited, she tells her husband: “I should like you to get something else, Gregory. It troubles me to think that half your time is spent packing up goods in the warehouse, and work of that sort; even if we got less I would much rather, even if we had to stint ourselves, that your work was more suitable to your past, and such that you could associate again with gentlemen on even terms.” (20)

When Mr. Hartley (Hillard) is “promoted” and about to leave Alexandria for the Sudan on Hicks’s campaign, his wife Annie tells him: “‘I should be selfish indeed to say a word to keep you back, and shall be delighted to think of you associating with other English gentlemen as one of themselves’“ (46). Annie rehearses the same words to her son, Gregory, when she is about to die: “‘I hope the time will come when you will associate with English gentlemen, and I should wish you in all respects to be like them. You belong to a good family, and should you by any chance some day go home, you must do credit to your dear father’“ (55). She tries to explain class differences in England to her son: “‘Well, my boy, you hardly understand the extent of the exclusiveness of some Englishmen. Of course it is not always so, but to some people the idea of their sons or daughters marrying into a family of less rank than themselves appears to be an almost terrible thing. As I have told you, although a daughter of a clergyman, I was, when I became an orphan, obliged to go out as a governess’“ (56). In spite of his mother’s social status, the hero, although raised in Egypt, is a perfect “gentleman.” The general who enlists him remarks: “The lad is a perfect gentleman,…which is certainly astonishing, he being a product of Cairo. I consider him in all aspects—except, of course, a classical education—fully equal to the average young officer on first joining’“ (91). Supposedly because he is a gentleman, Gregory breaks the law to rescue the enemy from drowning. When he is reprimanded by the British officer, Gregory tells the officer: “‘What I did…. I believe any white officer who was a swimmer would have done. No Englishman would see a woman drowning without making an effort to save her, if he had it in his power’“ (173). Being an English gentleman evidently entitles one to the white man’s burden. The British felt it was their duty to conquer not only the Sudan in order to save it from the fanatic Madhists, but also to have full control of Egypt. Mr. Hartley (Hillard) is convinced of the

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benefits of British control of the land: “‘In our hands it will be a very valuable possession, and certainly our stay here would be of inestimable advantage to the natives, as we should govern Egypt as we govern India, and do away with the tyranny, oppression and extortion of the native officials’“ (43). Once the Sudan is conquered, ”‘it will in time become a magnificently rich and fertile province’“ (248). The hero later finds his father’s diary which speaks to the so-called benefits of British rule in the Sudan: “It all depends upon yourselves [the Sudanese]. You have a great country. If you would but treat the poor people here well, and live in peace with other tribes, and send word down to Cairo that you desire above all things white hakims [doctors] and others who would teach you, to come up and settle among you, assuredly they would come. There are thousands of white men and women working in India, and China, and other countries, content to do good, not looking for high pay, but content to live poorly. The difficulty is not in getting men to heal and to teach, but to persuade those whom they would benefit to allow them to do the work.” (306)

Henty’s representation of Africans has to be read within the context of Victorian attitudes, aspirations, anxieties, and dreams. In With Kitchener in the Soudan, Henty’s overgeneralizations about the Sudanese become a camouflage for the real object of colonization and emigration. Mr. Hartley’s motives for emigrating to Alexandria are clearly economic when we consider what he tells Annie before he departs on the ill-fated Hicks campaign: “‘We should be fools indeed if we threw away the money that this business [campaign] will cost before it is over, and let Egypt slip altogether out of our fingers again’“ (43). British interest in the region is purely economic, but the narrator manipulates Abu, the Madhi’s favorite son, to agree to British domination: “‘I begin to see now,…that we are very ignorant. We can fight, but that is all we are good for. How much better it would be if, instead of regarding you white men as enemies, we could get some of you to live here and teach us the wonderful things that you know’“ (306). One of the things Abu might be requesting the British to teach his people could be the destruction of his civilization in the name of British civilization and progress. Gregory explains to Abu that life becomes unbearable for “‘people who have resisted the advance of knowledge and civilization’“ (308). “‘Those who accept civilization,’“ he continues “‘as the people of India—of whom there are many more than in all

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Africa—have accepted it, are prosperous…. In America and other great countries far beyond the seas the native Indians opposed it, but in vain; and now a great white race inhabit the land, and there is but a handful left of those who opposed them’“ (308). Abu’s ironic response is: “‘These things are hard to understand.’“ And the civilization Gregory alludes to is British, otherwise it is not civilization but savagery— a manichean vision of the world Later, Abu agrees with Gregory: “You have taught me much in your talks with me, and I do not see things as I used to. So much do I feel it, that in my heart I could almost wish that your countrymen should come here and establish peace and order. The Mohammedans of India, you tell me, are well content with their rulers; men may exercise their religion and customs without hindrance; they know that the strong cannot prey upon the weak, and each man reaps what he has sown in peace. You tell me that India was like the Soudan before you went there—that there were great conquerors, constant wars, and the peasants starved while the robbers grew rich; and that under your rule peace and contentment were restored.” (311–12)

Since Henty claimed that the indigenous Sudanese consent to British domination, the latter’s duty, a divine one, for that matter, is to colonize them and introduce them to “peace and prosperity.” It is as though all these ills which Abu thinks British rule would eliminate did not plague Victorian society, so that the British could honestly preach the gospel of peace and order. When Abu meets the hero after the latter’s father’s death, he takes to him instantly because Abu knows Mr. Hartley. Abu favors British rule; he tells the hero: “Your father told me often how peace and prosperity would return were you ever to become our masters, I felt that his words were true. Two hours ago, I regretted that Allah had not let me die, so that I should not have lived to see our people conquered; now I am glad. I believe all that he said, and that the Soudan will some day become again a happy country.” (366–67)

The alleged inferiority of the Sudanese people—hence the superiority of the British—is inscribed also in the fact that the former are “fanatic Mohammedans” whereas the British are “benevolent Christians.” When the hero saves Fatma from drowning, she tells the hero that she knew that “‘the ways of you Christians were better than our [Muslim] ways…. To be always raiding, and plundering, and killing cannot be good. It used to seem to me natural and right, but I have come to think

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differently’“ (202). It is ironic that Fatma is addressing a British soldier whose occupation in the Sudan is to fight and kill for no apparent reason. The servant-master relationship between Zaki and Gregory also attests to the alleged superiority of the British. Zaki’s devotion to Gregory is reminiscent of slave narratives that celebrate plantation life. When Gregory asks Zaki to accompany him on his next expedition, Zaki’s response confirms his devotion: “‘Surely I will go with my lord…. If my lord is killed I am ready to die with him…. Certainly, master; wherever you go I am ready to go. Whatever happens to you will, I hope, happen to me’“ (107–08). Zaki does not think his life is as worthy as his master’s. In fact, later during the expedition he tells Gregory that his life “‘is of no consequence, and [I] shall be glad to die by the side of so good a master’“ (170). Zaki is, after all, a valuable servant, and Gregory does not want to part with him, even though Gregory has to go to England to claim his title. After “six month’s trial” in England, Zaki “scorned the idea of returning to the Soudan,” preferring to beg in the streets. Because he believes, or is made to believe, that he is subhuman, incapable of initiative and incentive, Zaki rejects Gregory’s suggestion to free him and provide for him. Zaki retorts: “‘I should be a fool to wish to be my own master,…after having such a good one at present’“ (383–84). Henty, through his characterization, attempts to convince the reader that servitude is what the Sudanese desire, or that servitude is a blessing. Even when given the opportunity to live independently, Zaki prefers being a servant. He must, then, be born to serve his “superiors,” the British! The object of the campaign to reconquer the Sudan has much to do with avenging the humiliating defeat of the British and the death of Gordon. Henty wrote: “The long-delayed duty which England owed to one of her noblest sons had been done: Gordon had his burial. None knew where his bones reposed, but that mattered little. In the place where he was slain all honour had been done to him, and the British flag waved over the spot where he disappeared for ever from the sight of his countrymen” (245).

CHAPTER 5

To South Africa with Henty

The stereotypical images associated with African and non-British people, perpetuated by travel writers, anthropologists, and historians, and self-serving Victorian theories of race, found their way into Henty’s three South African novels: The Young Colonists (1885), With Buller in Natal (1901), and With Roberts to Pretoria (1902). In order to understand the tensions that gave rise to the depicted wars in these narratives, and to put the novels into a historical perspective, we need to survey the turbulent colonial history of South Africa from the early Dutch settlements through the nineteenth century. The origins of white supremacy and colonial rule in South Africa go back as far as mid-seventeenth century. When in 1652 the Dutch East India Company, one of the most prominent colonial trading companies in the world, dropped anchor at what became known as the Cape of Good Hope, they had no intention of creating a New Holland in South Africa. Under the direction of Jan van Riebeeck, the directors of the company decided to build a fort and a hospital, to allow the company’s employees to grow some food, and to set up navigation marks for ships at the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape was to serve as a refreshment station for ships and crew between the Netherlands and Batavia, in Java, where the company had its headquarters. A community of Europeans (mostly Dutch) emerged as a result of the Dutch presence and initiative, which encouraged French and English ships to drop anchor at the Cape. Ten years later van Riebeeck founded what became known as Cape Town. The descendants of this small community of Europeans became known as Afrikaners or Boers (Mermelstein 47–48). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these settlers 111

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waged war against the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape, the San and Khoikhoi peoples, occupied their land, and seized their cattle. Since the San and Khoikhoi refused to be used as a labor force or slaves, van Riebeeck appealed to the directors of the company to allow the importation of slaves into the Cape. About twenty-five thousand slaves from other African communities, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and Ceylon, were imported by the end of the eighteenth century. Laws were enacted to restrict and control the mobility of the slaves as their numbers grew. For instance by 1760 the slaves had to carry passes signed by their masters to prove they were not runaway slaves. The settlers, in search of additional land as they grew in number, came into contact with the Xhosa people. The result was a war that lasted for a century. Meanwhile the Dutch East India Company went bankrupt in 1794, and the following year British troops occupied the Cape (Mermelstein 48–50). British occupation of the Cape was mainly possible due to the French Revolution and the consequent French defeat of the Dutch: British occupation was designed to prevent a French takeover of the Cape from the Dutch whom the French had just defeated. It is noteworthy that the Cape was a strategic and commercial port for British ships en route to India, Britain’s largest imperial possession. British settlers, like the Dutch before them, arrived in substantial numbers, but British occupation of the Cape did not change the subservient status of the indigenous populations. In fact white supremacy became more entrenched, and the British continued the war the Dutch had begun against the Xhosas whose land was distributed among the settlers. In 1834 the thirty-five thousand slaves in South Africa were declared free, but they still remained apprenticed to their former masters for four more years. Meanwhile the landless Khoikhoi people, in search of free contract labor, came into contact with ex-slaves, whites, and other Africans, intermarried and produced a racial category known as Coloureds. Segregation laws were enacted to further isolate the nonWhite population socially, politically, and economically (Mermelstein 51). Between 1836 and 1846 Boer settlers, a sixth of the Cape’s population, migrated into the interior. This migration, known as the Great Trek, once again disrupted Xhosa and Zulu communities in the region of Natal. It is worth noting that the Boers had to seek British help in order to defeat the powerful and well-organized Zulu army. The Great Trek was a result of the Boers’ desire to carve out their own state,

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independent of British control. In their war of conquest, the Boers overpowered the Zulus and made them laborers on their own ancestral land. Zulus captured in the war were apprenticed, and those not able to work, such as the elderly, were subject to residential segregation. In 1843 the British annexed Natal because of fear that the Boers might develop a rival port to that of the Cape, now under British control. Consequently the Boers moved further into the interior where, at the expense of the Sotho people conquered with British assistance, they eventually carved out the Orange Free State and the South African Republic or the Transvaal. To the north the Boers carved out yet another state by defeating the Ndebele and Tswana people (Mermelstein 52–53). In the 1880s, when European nations were fighting over the partition of the African continent, the British moved quickly to occupy the Transvaal where the most important gold mines were located. Hence, in October of 1899 the (in)famous Anglo-Boer war broke out, which was ended in 1902 with the annexation of the Boer states. But shortly after, in 1907, both states were granted “responsible government,” and in 1909 the South African Act, passed by the British Parliament, gave birth to an “independent” Union of South Africa in 1910 (Mermelstein 62–63). THE YOUNG COLONISTS (1885) The series of battles described above furnished Henty with the material for his novel, The Young Colonists. This novel is a fictional account of two battles among many which the British fought in South Africa—against the Zulus in 1879 and against the Boers in 1881— battles the British lost. Although a handful of the British people saw these defeats as an indication of the decline of the British empire, by 1902 the British had succeeded in occupying the land the Boers had previously taken from the Zulus. To preface his accounts of these battles Henty wrote: After having written upwards of fifty records of almost unbroken success to the British arms in almost all parts of the world, I have found it painful to describe these two campaigns, in which we suffered defeat. I trust, however, that this story will prove of great interest to the reader because of the characteristic English pluck and daring of its hero, (quoted in Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 82)

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Henty believed that war was a training ground for character and a necessary step for future colonists. In fact a great majority of his novels are accounts of war expeditions he covered as a war correspondent for the London Standard. For Henty’s heroes, war is a rite of passage: the colony in Henty’s works serves as a training ground for manly activities which the hero will need when he returns home. Gail Clark in her “Imperial Stereotypes: G.A.Henty and the Boys’ Own Empire” maintains that, for Henty, the colonies provide an “arena for the exercise of those aggressive impulses” inhibited by a technologically advanced Britain (47). Since all but one of Henty’s heroes return to England, life in the colonies could be viewed as a transitory phase in the life of the English boy. Henty himself pointed out in an introductory note to his St. George for England: You may be told perhaps that there is no good to be obtained from tales of fighting and bloodshed—that there is no moral to be drawn from such histories. Believe it not. War has its lessons as well as Peace. You will learn from tales like this that determination and enthusiasm can accomplish marvels, that true courage is generally accompanied by magnanimity and gentleness, and that if not in itself the very highest of virtues, it is the parent of almost all the others, since but few of them can be practised without it. (3)

Set in the late 1870s The Young Colonists tells of two immigrant families, the Humphreys and the Jacksons. On the advice of a physician, the Humphreys decide to move to South Africa for the sake of Mrs. Humphreys’ health. For the Jacksons, life in their native town of Castleton, Derbyshire, was becoming too monotonous, and so they were ready for adventure in South Africa. Both Mr. Humphreys and Mr. Jackson had been successful and respected farmers in Castleton. The story is told from the perspective of Dick Humphreys and Tom Jackson, who volunteer their services to the British army at war with the Zulus, on the one hand, and the Boers on the other, for the control of South Africa. Both boys (fourteen when their families moved to Natal, South Africa) also take part in hunting and trading expeditions. The British attempt to disable the Zulu army under Ceteyawo leads to British defeat at the battle of Isandhlwana. Although the British reluctantly agree to Boer control of South Africa, the Humphreys and Jacksons seem unperturbed and make plans for the future. Mr. Humphreys’ farming activities are promising and he hopes to “be a wealthy man.” Tom is engaged to the daughter of a trader in Newcas-

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tle, and Dick expects to look for a wife in England when the family goes to visit the following year. John, Dick’s younger brother, intends to attend college and enter the church. Mr. Humphreys hopes to return to “Old England…with an abundant competency” in no more than fifteen years after he had made money from the sale of his plantation. The novel is set in a country where, as a result of the Dutch and British presence, racial segregation and white supremacist views were becoming the order of the day. Besides, Henty himself was a product of imperialist Victorian England: he was eighteen by 1850. It is in The Young Colonists that Henty’s belief in the British race, in the public school system, and in the Darwinian theory of evolution become apparent. It is customary for Henty to prepare his heroes for their adventure through intensive reading and conversation with people close to them. In The Young Colonists, Dick and Tom have relied on library books for information on the different peoples in South Africa where everyday life was supposed to be adventurous. Consequently, their friends begin to regard them as heroes even before their departure: Dick and Tom were quite heroes among their companions who looked with envy at boys who were going to live in a land where lions and elephants and all sorts of wild beasts abounded, to say nothing about warlike natives. (22)

These fourteen-year-old-boys’ knowledge of this image of South Africa attests not only to their own interest in, and ignorance of, the Cape colony, but also to both the interest and ignorance of the British at large. Besides, the above quote is an illustration of what had been written on Africa in previous centuries and what the British wished to believe about Africa. The Humphreys’ and the Jacksons’ decision to move to South Africa recalls the historic migration of the British to the Cape after the latter had been taken from the Dutch. These families’ decision also recalls Lord Salisbury’s appeal to the House of Lords in 1895 that it was the duty and responsibility of the British government to make it easier for businessmen to have access to new regions, especially fertile and heavily populated areas: “You must open the path, it is for you to enable us to get there. It is for you to enable capital to be invested and commerce to be extended” (quoted in Ausubel 87). Both the Humphreys and Jackson families function as a microcosm of the British settler-colonialist-adventurer, in that Mr.

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Humphreys decides to buy a farm in the Transvaal after their arrival in South Africa. Although Henty used Mrs. Humphreys’ deteriorating health as a sentimental justification for the family’s move to South Africa, history has it that, as a result of the development of the gold mines in the 1880s, the Transvaal became the most important region in southern Africa for colonists. Economic reasons, it is clear, became the main driving motive behind the migration of many British people to the colonies, where they expected to have access to the wealth that might have eluded them at home. As the old adage goes, “Who wants to drown his or her dog accuses the latter of having rabies.” Given the slagging British economy and the need for overseas territorial occupation, the Africans had to be denigrated, even more than before, in order to justify the occupation of their land. Hence, the civilizing mission had symbolic as well as economic dimensions. According to Abdul JanMohamed, distinguishing between “material and discursive practices” allows us to distinguish between the “covert” and “overt” practices of colonialism: the covert aim is to exploit the colony’s natural resources, but in colonial discourse the overt goal is to civilize the native, to introduce him or her to all the benefits of Western cultures. JanMohamed argues that while the imperialists “administer” the natural resources of the colony, “colonialist discourse ‘commodifies’ the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a ‘resource’ for colonialist fiction” (quoted in Gates 81–83). The Young Colonists exemplifies these ideas. Not only are the Zulus stereotyped as a warlike people, “naturally always burning for war” (40), but also they want to have access to the material benefits of the British. When the Zulus attacked the British regiment, “the boys [Dick and Tom]…could see the Zulus at the work of plundering. All the sacks and barrels were taken from the wagons and cut or broken open, each man taking as much as he could carry of tea, sugar, flour, and other necessaries; many of the yoke-oxen were assegaied at once, and cut up and eaten, the rest being driven off toward the north by a party of warriors” (59–60). Besides, the narrator reminds us that, “to the unhappy natives, the taking of the Transvaal by England was a blessing of the highest kind. For the first time the shooting of them [the natives] in cold blood had come to be considered a crime, and ordinances had been issued against slavery, which although generally evaded by the Boers, still promised a happy state of things in the future” (130). Because the so-called natives have supposedly acknowl-

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edged that England had saved them from the Boers, they “looked to Queen Victoria as a sort of guardian angel, and not a thought entered their heads that they would ere long be cruelly and basely abandoned to the mercies of the Dutch by the government of England” (130). Since the Boers are not willing to look to Queen Victoria, the narrator hopes the Africans will rise against them: “If a day should come when the natives at last rise and avenge upon the Boers the accumulated injuries of many years, neither Dick Humphreys nor Tom Jackson [the young colonists] will be inclined to lift a hand to save the Boers from their well-merited fate” (250). It is ironic that the Africans are expected to rise against the Boers, but not against the English for the same crimes: the unlawful occupation of the land belonging to the Africans. The image of the barbaric native comes into play in The Young Colonists when the narrator describes the alleged Zulu practice of cutting up the yoke-oxen and eating them at once, raw. Who but a savage would eat raw meat? To enforce the idea that the Zulus are not very far removed from the Stone Age, we are told that the dwellings of the Zulus resemble great beehives. Henty compares the Zulus to the Scotch borderers who harassed the English during “olden times.” In his essay “With Henty to Africa” Jeffrey Richards makes an interesting comparison when he says that the Zulus are viewed as living in a “medieval state of social and political evolution, which makes their behavior understandable, if not condonable” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 96). Although Henty sympathizes with the natives for having been taken advantage of by the Boers, he is also convinced that the Zulus are but savages. From the ongoing discussion it is not surprising that the Boers do not escape the negative stereotypes the Zulus face in this novel, simply because the British and the Boers are at war over the control of South Africa. Even the seeming sympathy on the narrator’s part for the Zulus is questionable. Henty’s goal is to spread the superiority of the British people, and thus he asserts that the Dutch, despite their skin color, are not as good as the British. Although Tom and Dick have noticed and admired the Boer soldiers in action in Zululand, the boys, nevertheless, have a strong distaste for their manner of living: However extensive the possessions and numerous the herds of a Boer, he lives in the same primitive style as his poorest neighbor. The dress of a farmer, wife, and family is no better than that of laborers; whole

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families sleep in one room; books are almost unknown in their houses, and they are ignorant and prejudiced to an extreme degree. Upon his horse and his gun the Boer will spend money freely, but for all other purposes he is thrifty and close-fisted in the extreme. Water is regarded as useful for drinking purpose, but its utility for matters of personal cleanliness is generally altogether ignored. (129–30)

An Englishman, Bernard Hawkes, once maintained that although “an Englishman was popularly supposed to be the equal of two Frenchmen, I have never come across anything to justify the latter part of the statement, the nearest approach being that after Blake’s victory over van Tromp, popular opinion magnified an Englishman into being equal to four Dutchmen” (quoted in Arnold 23). Jeffrey Richards points out that Henty’s attitude toward the Boers comes from the fact that more is expected of the Dutch (who are members of the White race, although not British) than of the Africans, with whom the narrator “sympathizes” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 96– 97). While this assertion remains valid, the narrator’s sympathy makes no difference in the lives of the so-called natives, and whether we talk about British subjugation or that of the Boers, subjugation remains just that. And, while the Dutch appear to be a disgrace to the White race, the Africans are either very obedient or warlike. I would argue that the narrator seems to prefer the Zulus to the Boers because between the two races the latter had more sophisticated weapons to effectively challenge the British sovereignty in South Africa. Mr. Humphreys told his son, Dick: “As for the Dutch, I can’t really blame the Zulus. The Boers are always encroaching on their territory, and any remonstrance is answered by a rifle-shot” (Henty 40), ignoring that the English are also encroaching on other people’s territory. For Mr. Harvey, an English trader in The Young Colonists, to refer to the Boers as “an obstinate, pigheaded race,” (195) is to allude to the alleged superiority of the British and the pseudo-scientific doctrine of the chain of being in which the African is at the bottom, but the British attitude toward the Boers in the novel tends to defy the order in the chain. Henty takes pains to distinguish between savage and noble insurrections. Any insurrection on the part of the Zulus is deemed to be a savage and barbarous act, but the British who wipe out whole villages in their campaign are considered to be noble and gallant men. When, in a confrontation with the British army, the Zulus killed a French prince who had received his military education at Woolwich in England and had volunteered to fight for the British imperial cause, the narrator

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refers to his killing as barbarous. The story of his death allegedly constitutes one of the “darkest” pages in the annals of history: “There are few pages of history more sad than those which relate to his death [the prince’s] in a paltry skirmish in a corner of Africa. To Englishmen the page is all the more sad, inasmuch as, had the men accompanying him acted with the coolness and calmness generally shown by Englishmen in moments of danger, instead of being carried away by a cowardly panic, the prince imperial might yet be alive” (106). This incident is suggestive of the romanticization of imperial wars and the militarization of the public school where duty toward the British empire was of prime importance. Although the protagonists, Dick and Tom, did not previously intend to take part in the war, they now feel it is their duty to fight and even die for the empire. Besides, according to the public school system, pursuing the imperial cause is the right thing to do; it is playing the game. The goal of the public school in Tom Brown’s Schooldays “is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys but to make them good English boys, good future citizens” (Hughes 52). Although the narrator in The Young Colonists is not explicit about the school Dick and Tom attend, we are led to believe they are in the public school system; after all, with one exception, Henty’s heroes all attend public schools. In The Young Colonists, Mr. Humphreys explains to Dick (who does not see any use in learning) why it is crucial that he remain in school: “…It is not the fact of knowing Latin or Greek and mathematics which benefits a man; but it is the learning of them. It is the discipline to the mind that is of benefit…. There is no use in cricket, or in boating, or in hunting, but these things strengthen the body and make it active and healthy, and able to do better everything that it undertakes….” (2). Mr. Humphreys’ advice to his son is reminiscent of the Hughes’s philosophy of muscular Christianity advocated at Rugby, the epitome of the nineteenth-century public school. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays Mr. Brown meditates on what to tell his son who is about to transfer from a private school to a public one: Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he’s sent to school to make himself a good scholar? Well but he isn’t sent to school for that—at any rate, not for that mainly. I don’t care a straw for Greek particles or digamma; no more does his mother…. If he’ll only turn out brave, helpful, a truthtelling Englishman and a gentlemen and a Christian, that’s all I want. (59)

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The link between Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Henty’s The Young Colonists is seen in the way they both reflect the nature and objective of the nineteenth-century public school. In The Young Colonists we saw how selectively Henty inserted historical information about the British campaigns in South Africa into his tale to convey his message. It is not surprising, then, that Henty failed to explain to his young readers the driving forces behind the so-called Kaffir (Xhosa) wars. He also did not tell us why the Boers wanted to “kick down the bridge which has helped them over the stream” (29). Evidently, Henty was more interested in stereotypes and negative representations of the Other (the warlike natives, and the “sullen and sulky” Dutch) than he was in teaching history. The connections between British empire-building, educational institutions, and the concept of race, become evident when we note how consistently they were joined in juvenile literature and how broadly that literature disseminated their imperialist themes and goals. WITH BULLER IN NATAL, OR A BORN LEADER (1901) This narrative attempts to reconstruct the first phase of the AngloBoer war, which ends with the relief of the town of Ladysmith. The hero, Chris King, and twenty other youngsters, sons of Johannesburg gentlemen, belong to an independent Scout Unit designed to aid the British army at war with the Boers. Mr. and Mrs. King and their son Chris had migrated to South Africa ten years earlier from England, under the auspices of London capitalists: Mr. King had been employed by a London-based firm to give an account of the prospects of the gold fields in Johannesburg. At the Stock Exchange in Johannesburg, British immigrants assemble, and are informed about the impending war. For years tensions between the British and the Boers over the control of South Africa had been mounting, and finally escalated when Paul Kruger sent an ultimatum to the British government declaring war. The immigrants claim to have been denied the rights of citizenship, the freedom of speech and of public meeting, and the right to bear arms. Besides, they resent the fact that their children are taught in Dutch in the schools, and that the editors of the newspapers representing the immigrants have been imprisoned. Henty wrote: “Never before had a large body of intelligent men been kept in a state of abject subjection by an inferior race, a race almost without even the elements of civilization, ignorant and brutal beyond any existing white commu-

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nity….” (12). Early in the story Chris is made leader of the Scouts who become instrumental in the British occupation of Lady smith. The boys engage in blowing up bridges (to prevent Boer shipment of ammunition), in spying, and in combat situations. After the war, Chris joins his parents in London, “where he enjoyed a well-earned rest, his pleasure being only marred by the necessity for telling the story of his adventures again and again to the relations and friends of his parents” (384). The story is told from Chris’s point of view and focuses more on the scouting activities than on the battles undertaken by the regular army. Henty, in this novel, showed awareness of his shortcomings as a self-proclaimed historian, when he wrote in the preface that any accurate history of the war would be impossible: It will be a long time before the story of the late war can be written fully and impartially…. I have, however, endeavoured to reconcile the various narratives of the fighting in Natal, and to make the account of the military occurrences as clear as possible. Fortunately, this is not a history, but a story, to which the war forms the background, and, as is necessary in such a case, it is the heroes of my tale, the little band of lads from Johannesburg, rather than the British troops, who are the most conspicuous characters of the narrative. (4)

Given his imperialist objective, Henty’s concern was not to give an accurate account of the war, but to validate the British war with the Boers and spread his white-supremacy views. In my critique of this novel, I shall focus on the relevance of the Boy Scout movement to the building and maintenance of the British empire. The Boy Scout movement grew out of the nineteenth-century public school code, middle-class concerns about a decaying society exemplified by city slums, and the need to inject new blood into a declining empire (MacDonald, Sons of the Empire 4). In With Buller in Natal, Chris and his friends who join in the relief of Ladysmith are examples of this new energy Britain supposedly needed to revitalize its colonial stance and possessions. The novel also reveals the British notions of race superiority one finds in most of Henty’s juvenile books dealing with the empire: here, it is the Boers, not the Africans, who are the focus of Henty’s ridicule, even though the Zulus and the Sothos are also treated with condescension. The scouting movement was also motivated by England’s supposed unreadiness to defend its colonial possessions. H.M.Moss, headmaster of Shrewsbury School in England (1872–1908), expressed his anxiety

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over the future of the empire in his address, National Defence. He asked: “Do we wish to retain our Empire even at the cost of much trouble, or are we completely indifferent whether it holds together or is wrested from us, or drops away from our nerveless grasp?” [quoted in MacKenzie 119]. After the Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902), Shrewsbury School was the first to set up a Cadet Corps. Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, was convinced that the imperial role of the public school was to mold the “neo-imperial warrior: untroubled by doubt, firm in conviction, strong in mind and muscle” (MacKenzie 120). In an attempt to find a remedy for juvenile delinquency, the Boys’ Brigade was founded in the 1880s in the slums of Glasgow. The Boys’ Brigade (aimed at promoting “Christian manliness”—an idea taken from Hughes’s muscular Christianity) was founded by William Alexander Smith who later suggested to Robert Baden-Powell1 (1857– 1941) the idea of what in 1908 became known as the Boy Scout movement. George Henty was the vice-president of the Boys’ Brigade (Green, The Adventurous Male 81). It is not coincidental, then, that his juvenile books are imbued with activities relating to scouting. The Boy Scout movement was essentially a patriotic initiative born as a result of the growing anxiety over the future of the British empire. In With Buller in Natal patriotism and devotion to the cause of the empire are the driving forces behind Chris’s and his friends’ decision to volunteer their services to the empire. Chris articulates their objectives as members of the Boy Scouts in these terms: “‘We should be, in fact,…acting generally on independent service, either scouting, or going in among the Boers and getting intelligence, trying to blow up bridges, and engaging looting parties—for we may be sure that the Boers will be scattering all over the country plundering’“ (46). The boys usually disguise their true identity, and because they all speak Dutch, they become instrumental in obtaining information from the Boer camp in order to ascertain the strength of the enemy. General Symons congratulates the boys (who had previously infiltrated into the Boer camp) and stresses their indispensability: “I am sure, Mr. King, that you would wish to be in the thick of the fighting, but I would rather that you curbed your impetuosity, for after the manner in which you obtained this news for me, I can see that your party will do far greater service in scouting and in gaining intelligence than they could afford in action.” (99)

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The public school code of playing the game, of war as a game, goes hand in hand with scouting activities. In With Buller in Natal Chris decides to blow up a bridge in order to prevent the advancement of the Boers. Field, one of the scouts, is amazed at Chris’s daring and courage: “‘You talk as coolly about it, as if you were going out for a few days’ picnic.’“ To this Chris replies: “‘It is the same sort of thing, except that it will be longer, a bit rougher, and a good deal more interesting’“ (161). Chris, as the subtitle of the novel indicates, is a born leader, a true Henty hero. Henty comments on the physique of his hero: “The lad was a fine specimen of the young Uitlander [settler]. A life passed largely in the open air, hard work and exercise, had broadened his shoulders and made him look at least a year older than he really was” (23). Not only is the hero physically fit, he is also willing to take command. For instance, as the British immigrants are fleeing from the Cape region, at the approach of war, and after days of walking, they arrive at a farmhouse belonging to a Boer. The latter threatens them, and refuses to give them the bread and milk they desperately need to feed the children. Chris and two other boys force their way into the house, take the owner hostage, and give “the howling Boer a tremendous thrashing” (40). Chris later tells the farmer: “‘Now you can get up, you hulking ruffian. I am going to give you a lesson in civility. Oh, you won’t get up! Well, it will make no difference to me…. There, you may get up and go, and I hope that the lesson will do you good’“ (40). Here, we are reminded of the formulaic Henty hero—the punishment-giving hero—or the public school headmaster who disciplines a rebellious pupil. By “thrashing” the Boer, Chris declares the long-awaited war: “‘As far as we are concerned, the war has begun,’“ says Chris who receives compliments from his friends. Peter, one of the boys, says enthusiastically: “‘You are something like a hero. We knew that you were a good fellow, and would make the best leader among us, but no one could think that our choice would turn out so well as it has done’“ (147). One can draw a parallel between scouting and the Victorian public school, or rather a parallel between the public school code of playing the game (war) and scouting activities and leadership when one considers how Chris becomes the leader of the Scouts: “‘Is he chosen because he is the oldest of you?’“ one officer inquires. “‘No, that has nothing to do with it,’“ Fields tells the officer, “‘we are all within a year of the same age. We have all been chums and friends,

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and have hunted and shot together, and he is the one we elected as our leader, just as you would choose the captain of a cricket club’“ (61). After the incident with the Boer farmer, Chris becomes a celebrity in the camp. A staff member commends Chris’s handling of the situation in these terms: “‘Upon my word, Mr. King, you managed the matter admirably; no cavalry leader could have done it better.’“ To this Chris responds: “‘There is no particular credit about the management; we acted just as we should have done had we been stalking a herd of deer instead of a party of Boers’“ (87–88). Chris’s response can be viewed in two ways: on the one hand, it reminds us of the public school’s emphasis on games, sport, and hunting: “‘We have all been chums and friends, and have hunted and shot together’“ (61), and on the other hand, Chris might have been equating the intelligence of a Boer with that of a deer that cannot be too intelligent for the Scouts to hunt down. Like the classic hero, Chris leaves home to accomplish a mission. Mrs. King is saddened by her son’s farewell, but she apparently understands her son’s decision to volunteer for the war: “There was, of course, a sad parting that evening between Chris and his mother, but she bore up well. She knew that hundreds of other women were parting with husbands and sons, and she felt that, as the main cause of the war was to rescue the Uitlanders [British immigrants] in the Transvaal from the oppression of the Boers, it behooved all the fugitives from that country to do their utmost” (59). British citizens, especially the youth, are thus charged with the duty to defend the empire, and to protect themselves from an inferior race. Henty attempts to provide some justification for the war from the Victorian point of view. The reader is made aware of the Boers’ ingratitude toward the British. Henty wrote: “Every Boer seemed to take a pleasure in neglecting no opportunity of showing his contempt for the men whose enterprise and labour had enormously enriched the country, and whose superior intelligence he was too grossly ignorant to appreciate” (13). Historically the British had helped the Boers in the past when the latter were threatened by the Zulus and the Swazis. Consequently Chris and his friends are unable to comprehend Boer animosity toward the British, “and watch the approaching crisis with delight, unmingled with anxiety and foreboding of the capitalists, who, without doubting what the end must be, were sure that enormous losses and sacrifices must result before their deliverance from Boer oppression could be obtained” (24). The irony, here, is that the Black South

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Africans also needed deliverance from both the British and the Boers. Evidently, writing from the British perspective, Henty did not even allude to the British oppression of the indigenous people, implying that the British had the right to subjugate them. How could the British speak of being oppressed while they were oppressing other people? The narrator refers to the British as immigrants, but he also depicts them as the rightful occupants of the land, fighting Boer intruders. The previous British alliance with the Boers (to defeat the Swazis and Zulus) is broken when the Boers attempt to control South Africa. How does Henty approach the theme of the Other, the Boers and the different ethnic communities in With Buller in Natal? The following is what the narrator has to say about the Boers: They [Boers] were indeed as unsavoury in appearance as they were brutal in manner. Water is scarce in the Transvaal, and is used most sparingly for all purposes of cleanliness. The Boer sleeps in his clothes, gives himself a shake when he gets up, and his toilet is completed, unless on very exceptional occasions, when he goes outside the door to the water-cask, fills his hands with water, and rubs them over his face. Four times a year, however, the Boers indulge in a general wash before starting with their wives and families for four or five days’ stay at the nearest town, to attend the services of the church and to do their quarter’s marketing. (33)

Here, the narrator attempts to legitimize British rule and control by stereotyping the Boers. The quote also calls to mind the rivalry among European nations prior to the Berlin West African Conference. In With Buller in Natal stereotypes about the Boers abound. When British soldiers arrive at a deserted Boer camp, they begin their routine investigation. They find many articles of luxury covered with dirt, and notice a missing article. Henty wrote: “One article which would have been found in a British camp was altogether absent from those of the enemy, and it was a joke among our troops that the only piece of soap ever captured was found in the pocket of a dead Boer, and its wrapper was still unopened” (341). Cairns (one of the scouts) dismisses the Boers’ claims to be Christians, and refers to them as ruffians: “‘And these scoundrels call themselves Christian men, and their friends speak of them as simple pious farmers! I call them both from their appearance and their actions, as unmitigated a set of ruffians as are to be found on the face of the globe’“ (33). It is as though anyone who

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would dare challenge British authority could not possibly be Christian, or the only Christians to have imperialist tendencies should be British. The indigenous people of South Africa are not the focus of Henty’s stereotyping, but the author’s attitude toward them is quite condescending. On the rare occasions the Swazis, the Zulus, the Xhosas, and the Sothos are mentioned in the novel, they are either being examined for their potential to be porters (checked as to whether they were wellbuilt men, and looked capable of hard work—reminiscent of the slave auction bloc) or helping the British in their war against the Boers. By relegating them to menial and servant positions, and by failing to articulate the grievances of the Swazis, the Sothos, the Xhosas, and the Zulus, whose land the Boers and the British occupied by the power of the gun, Henty deliberately denied their humanity and history. Thus Henty, alongside other writers of empire, reconstructed or rewrote the colonial history of Africa. This reconstruction, because it denies the existence and humanity of the African people, becomes a basis for colonization. To colonize them can be interpreted as saving them. As in The Young Colonists, in With Buller in Natal Henty is paternalistic toward the Swazis who apparently look to the British for salvation from their enemies, the Boers. The Swazis criticize the British for not intervening in time to rescue them from the Boers: “‘If you beat them [Boers], we shall be free. Last time you were beaten, and gave the whole country to the Boers, and left our people, who fought for you, at their mercy’“ (169). The narrator criticizes British handling of this first phase of the Anglo-Boer war: many lives have been lost, “because a handful of miserable curs at home were ready to betray the honour of England, in order that they might make matters smooth for themselves at home” (368–69). The relevance of the Boy Scout movement to the empire remains central to With Buller in Natal. Chris remarks that “‘if Sir George Colley had accepted a few hundred of us, who knew the Boers well, as scouts and skirmishers, the affair would have turned out very differently; for as you know, they did not succeed through the whole affair in taking one of the places held by our colonists’“ (363). The officer who discharges the scouts after the relief of Ladysmith speaks in these terms: “‘You have an experience that you will look back upon with satisfaction all your lives. You have done your duty, and more than your duty. You have before you useful lives, and have amply shown that in whatever position you may be placed you will be a credit to yourselves and your friends’“ (379). Their experiences, as Baden-

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Powell would have expected, have made them men ready to be productive citizens who would endeavor to maintain the British empire: their experiences constitute a rite of passage. In fact Chris leaves for England at the end of the war, after he has passed his initiation test not only as a young colonist, but also as a youth who has devoted his life to the empire. Chris’s devotion is such that he often complains when the scouts “‘get no share of the fighting and a full share of the hardships,’“ because fighting is supposed to be synonymous with fun and games (cricket). All these qualities—pluck, daring, sacrifice, and sense of duty—appeal to the young, and Henty, aware of his readership, wrote a sequel to cover the second phase of the Anglo-Boer war which he entitled With Roberts to Pretoria. WITH ROBERTS TO PRETORIA (1902) In the preface to With Roberts to Pretoria Henty wrote: I have now endeavoured to recount the leading incidents in the second phase of the war, and although events have moved so rapidly that the capture of Pretoria is already an old story, I may hope that it has not lost its interest with British boys, and that With Roberts to Pretoria will meet with as favourable a reception as that given last year to its companion volume, (vi)

It is unlikely that Henty’s lads ever lost interest in their favorite author. Despite his verbose style and the exaggerations and inconsistencies in his so-called historical novels, Henty was one of the institutions of the Victorian age. George Man ville Fenn, Henty’s biographer and close friend, asserted that in Henty’s stories there is “no nervous under-view, no imagining of things which are not there, but the easy, straightforward writing of a manly Englishman who took things as they were, who disdained the building of structures on flimsy mighthave-beens, but liked a solid foundation of fact” (336). Yet how factual could Henty’s accounts of the British wars of conquest in southern Africa have been, when we know that the author, although a war correspondent, never had the opportunity to report on either the AngloBoer wars or the Anglo-Zulu wars that provided the framework for these novels? According to Fenn, Henty was, “in imagination, with Roberts at Kandahar, with Kitchener at Khartoum, and with Buller in Natal” (320). What captures our attention here, is what Fenn calls the

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“manly Englishman,” and Henty’s preoccupation with the public school and its rewards. But first, the summary of the story. With Roberts to Pretoria is a fictional account of the second phase of the Anglo-Boer war. John Harberton, rector in Somersetshire, lost his private income (derived from his shares) when the Birmingham and Coventry Banking Company went bankrupt. As a result, his son, Yorke Harberton, the young hero, goes out to South Africa to live with his cousin, Mr. Allnutt. The latter is a British settler-farmer married to a Dutch woman who understandably sympathizes with the Boers. As the war approaches, Yorke enlists as a scout, but before he leaves town, he makes an enemy in Dirck Jansen, a young Dutchman and cousin to Mrs. Allnutt, who later attempts to kill Yorke. As the war draws to a close Dirck is killed. Meanwhile, Yorke excels in Dutch and becomes an indispensable asset to the war effort as a spy. Yorke has two devoted and faithful servants, Hans and Peter, respectively a Dutch and a South African (Xhosa). Yorke also takes part in many campaigns and finally joins General Roberts’s staff in the occupation of Pretoria. At the end of the war the young hero goes to work for Mr. Chambers, a wealthy British miner, but plans to settle in England at thirty. Meanwhile, Mr. Chambers “arranges” a relationship between his daughter, Mary, and Yorke which is likely to result later in marriage. In With Roberts to Pretoria, references to the public school are prevalent—so prevalent that Henty “conferred on Cecil Rhodes the public school education he never had” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 78). The hero, Yorke Haberton, meets Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, and in their introductory greetings Rhodes declares, after learning that Yorke was at Rugby: “‘So you were at Rugby!…I am a public-school boy myself, you know, and there is always a fellow-feeling among public-school boys, even if they were not at the same school’“ (174). Indeed, Yorke was …a typical public-school boy—straight and clean-limbed, free from all awkwardness, bright in expression, and possessed of a large amount of self-possession, or, as he himself would have called it, “cheek”; was a little particular about the set of his Eton jacket and trousers and the appearance of his boots; as hard as nails and almost tireless; a good specimen of the class by which Britain has built up, her colonies formed, and her battlefields won—a class in point of energy, fearlessness, the spirit of adventure, and a readiness to face and overcome all difficulties, and unmatched in the world. (16)

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Mr. Haberton Senior is convinced that his son’s public school education qualifies him for colonial life in South Africa: “‘He is nearly sixteen,’“ says Mr. Haberton, “‘and a public-school boy of that age has learned to think more for himself, and to be more independent, than one two years older who has always been kept at home, or perhaps educated with two or three others by a clergyman’“ (18). Here the public school makes all the difference; it is what distinguishes Yorke from the average middle-class boy. Yorke meets other public school friends, who are also eager to enlist in the army. The officer who conscripts Yorke identifies with the young hero’s devotion to the empire. As a public school boy himself, an Etonian, the officer “‘can quite understand your [Yorke’s] eagerness to take part in this business’“ (76). Yorke has other advantages from attending Rugby: although a new recruit, Yorke does not need to go through the preliminary drills, “as he had for two years been a member of the Rugby Cadet corps, and therefore knew as much of drill as most of the officers” (81). The public school was not only an environment for character formation, it was also an institution where “…many of the fellows were meant for the army, and were very keen about it” (82). Yorke tells Mr. Chambers that although he is not more than eighteen years old, “‘the games that one plays at school make one quick…. A fellow sends down a ball at your wicket, and while it is on its way, which is not much above a second, you have to decide what to do with it, whether you will block it, or drive it, or cut it to leg. It is the same with football, and at boxing or single-stick you have to guard a blow and return it before, as one would imagine, you had the time to think’“ (356). It appears as though Yorke would have been incapable of doing anything right had he not been to a public school. The worst thing, though, about the public school, Yorke argues, is “‘you get to hate indoor life. I would rather a hundred times go to sea or enlist in the army, when I am old enough’“ (15). When the Christian Leader praised Henty’s By Sheer Pluck because the “book has everything that could be desired, setting before the boy the bright and bracing ideal of the English ‘gentleman,’“ the periodical was referring to three elements: Englishness (race), gentlemanliness (class), and manliness (gender) (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 76). The emphasis on manliness and masculinity in juvenile literature in the second half of the nineteenth century can be traced back, not only to the public school doctrine of “muscular Christianity,” but also to Samuel Smiles’s philosophy outlined in his

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Self-Help (1859). Henty never lost sight of the Smilesian ideal, in that doctrines of “character” and self-improvement were at the core of his work. Jeffrey Richards maintains that “all Henty’s work conforms in general terms to a Smilesian model” (“Spreading the Gospel of SelfHelp,” 53–54). Smiles aimed his book—published a year after Tom Brown’s Schooldays—at young men: …to reinculcate those old-fashioned but wholesome lessons… that youth must work in order to enjoy—that nothing credible can be accomplished without application and diligence—that the student must not be daunted by difficulties but conquer them by patience and perseverance—and that above all, he must seek elevation of character without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught, (quoted in Richards, “Spreading the Gospel of Self-Help,” 53)

Some of the titles of Henty’s books, Richards argues, could have been “chapter headings” from Smiles’s Self-Help (54). Allen Warren points out that “the ghost of Samuel Smiles [was] hovering over much of the writing on popular manliness” in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Mangan and Walvin 200). Self-Help could have been an adult version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, in that Smiles believed that “a man perfects himself by work more than by reading—that it is life rather than literature, action rather than study, and character rather than biography which tend perpetually to renovate mankind” (Smiles 7). In both works the authors stressed perseverance, self-reliance, work, and action rather than study and the reading of literature. As aforementioned, toward the end of the nineteenth century, work, war, and games became synonymous and closely related to the frontier life of adventure, scouting, soldiering, and above all manliness. Nineteenth-century Evangelicalism might have sown the seeds of what became known as Christian soldier-heroes. Evangelicals set out to preach the possibility of being a professional soldier and a zealous Christian, because in the nineteenth century war was seen “as a moral force and the profession of soldiering a noble one” (Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature 80–81). This concept of the Christian soldier-hero explains the Bible-and-the-Gun theory whereby the conversion to Christianity of would-be colonized people was facilitated by the use of military power. Military imagery was in vogue in hymns such as: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” and “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross” (Richards 81). Thus “manliness” acquired a new definition among the

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middle-class, owing to Evangelical religion and urban capitalism. This new definition emphasized the “work ethic, independence from patronage or favor, piety and high-mindedness, sobriety and chastity, and dedication to family pursuits”2 (Roper and Tosh 46). Although Smiles had noted in Self-Help that home was the prime domain where a man exhibits his manly character, at the peak of the new imperialism, manliness was to be demonstrated in the armed services and colonial administration. In the words of John Tosh, “the empire beckoned in reaction against domesticity,” and took on a new meaning in the “masculine imagination.” Popular “Christian heroes” or symbols of imperial manliness were people who were far from being domesticated, people who either never married (Gordon, Kitchener, Rhodes, all of whom were popular generals in the Anglo-Boer or Anglo-Zulu wars) or who married very late (Baden-Powell, Luggard, Milner) (Roper and Tosh 67–68). As Baden-Powell put it in Scouting for Boys (1908), “manliness can only be taught by men, and not by those who are half men, half old women” (Roper and Tosh 266): thus manliness was partly (re)defined at the expense of women, and as a reaction to domesticity. In With Roberts to Pretoria, although Yorke was “very fond of his sisters,” he “regarded them as mere girls, and especially objected to being in any way, as he considered, patronized by them” (Henty 16). This is how close Henty came to Thomas Carlyle’s declaration to his future wife: “‘I must not and cannot live in a house of which I am not the head’“ (quoted in Roper and Tosh 15). Henty demonstrated this concept of manliness in With Roberts to Pretoria through legendary British soldiers such as Baden-Powell, Roberts, and Kitchener: “Lord Roberts had long been the popular hero of the British army. Not only had he accomplished all that he had undertaken—[but] his name had been associated with the long series of successes in India.” And Kitchener “had in Egypt shown not only the qualifications necessary for a leader of men, but an extraordinary power of organization” (307). Baden-Powell’s strength and leadership role are manifested in his message to Cronje, the Boer general, whom Baden-Powell asks to surrender after hours of bombardment during the historic siege of Mafeking: “‘All well. Four hours’ bombardment; one dog killed…. Tell General Cronje that I will let him know when we have had enough’“ (339). Henty‘ s use of famous military figures of British imperialism, and his reliance on the cult of heroes and heroworship, made scouting and military service appealing to the young. As one colonel said in With Roberts to Pretoria, “‘a few years in the

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army does no man any harm, if he is steady and well-conducted; and if he is well educated, as you are [referring to Yorke], he is certain to get his stripes in a couple of years’“ (78). Like the public school ethics and the cult of hero-worship and manliness, race is of particular interest to Henty in With Roberts to Pretoria. Mrs. Allnutt and Hans, both Dutch, and Peter, a Black South African, are targets of Henty’s stereotyping. Mr. Allnutt had come to the Cape thirty years earlier, and had worked on the farm of a Dutch farmer whose daughter fell in love with the “good-looking Englishman” (36). After her father’s death she married Mr. Allnutt, and the couple moved into the old house where she had grown up. Mrs. Allnutt, we are told, kept “in touch with civilization” by spending time in Cape Town. Before her father’s death Mrs. Allnutt had spent two years in Cape Town, “and her subsequent visits there had prevented her from falling into the loose and slovenly way of the ordinary Boerfarmer’s wife”(37). Just as Mr. Allnutt and British civilization function as a blessing to Mrs. Allnutt, Yorke is portrayed as the bearer of the torch of enlightenment: both Hans and Peter allegedly need “improvement,” and Yorke undertakes to do this. When Yorke is about to enlist in the army, he takes Hans with him, but Hans has to undergo a metamorphosis: “[A]fter you have put the horses in the stable…go to some little barber’s shop and have your hair trimmed. Have it cut short like mine. When you have done that, have a thorough wash. You are more particular in that respect than you used to be when I first knew you, but there is room for a lot of improvement; and as you have made up your mind to follow my fortune whatever it may be, it is as well, at any rate when you join [the corps of volunteers], to look clean.” (68)

Yorke later tells Hans: “‘Now you have to do credit to yourself and to me, to try and look smart when you are in uniform, to keep those long arms of yours from swinging about, to hold your head up, and to walk briskly and smartly.’“ To this Hans replies: “‘I will try my best Master Yorke, but I don’t think I shall ever look like those soldiers I have seen walking about the street, especially those chaps with trousers that look so tight. I can’t make out how they can sit down’“ (80). Not only is Yorke making an English boy out of a Dutch boy, he is also transforming him into a member of the Boy Scouts, the Boys’ Brigade, or a public school boy. After Hans had helped save Mr. Chambers and his

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family from a group of armed German and Dutch robbers, Mr. Chambers offers him a gift of five hundred pounds. Hans, “eyes open with surprise,” exclaims: “‘I only did what my master told me, sir’“ (277). Yorke has no doubts about Hans “being steady,” and establishing himself as a farmer by “taking on” a few “Kaffirs:” “‘After a bit you will, as you extend your cultivated ground and carry the work farther, take on more Kaffirs and you will have to see that they do their work. That was how Mr. Allnutt did, and it is only in that way that you will get work out of them’“ (282), a clear assertion of the myth of the lazy African. Although Hans is impressed and thankful for the fortune he now possesses, he is saddened by the fact that Yorke will not remain his friend for life, because Hans admittedly cannot make it on his own: “‘It will be grand, but you will not be with me Master Yorke, and I had hoped that, whatever you were doing, you would always keep me with you’“ (282). Mr. Chambers also offers Peter two hundred pounds, and patronizingly tells him: “‘Don’t spend it in folly at the Cape; go back to your own people, build a kraal, buy cattle, and settle down there’“ (Henty, 278). The paternalistic treatment of both Hans and Peter, or rather the “duty” of the Englishmen (Mr. Chambers and Yorke) to “civilize” both Hans and Peter, is exemplified in Yorke’s words of gratitude to Mr. Chambers: “Thank you most heartily, Mr. Chambers, I am certain that both of them will do justice to your kindness. I am sure of Hans being steady; as I have already persuaded the Kaffir to swear off liquor, he will, I feel certain, take your advice, which is indeed almost the same as I gave him when getting him to promise not to spend his earnings in drink…. He has promised to hand over his pay, when he gets it, to me…. Of course, I do not know what I shall be doing myself; if I can, I shall certainly accompany him and see him settled. As to Hans, I have no fear as to his doing well; he certainly was not a hard worker until I went to my cousin’s farm, but since then he has quite woke up.” (278)

This quote also reflects the hierarchy in the representation of Hans and Peter, following the theory of the chain of beings. In other words, while Yorke is more confident in Hans being able to make it on his own later in life (although Hans himself is less confident), he remains doubtful about Peter’s future. In fact Yorke becomes a moralist and convinces Peter to keep off alcohol. Ironically Yorke’s advice to Peter recalls Mr. Haberton’s advice to his son, Yorke, on the eve of his departure for South Africa: “‘Yorke, it is evident that you cannot be

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too careful, and it would be a comfort both to your mother and me to know that you have set out with a stern resolution to avoid liquor— except, of course, in case of illness or in exceptional circumstances’“ (27). Although the Boers are the villains in this novel, they are still portrayed in a better light than Africans. The narrator very seldom compliments the indigenous people, but when he does, in the same breath he condemns them for their alleged barbarity: “The Kaffirs needed no instruction from him [Yorke] in the art of scouting, it was born in their blood, and they have been taught as boys among their tribes, before they drifted away south as drivers of bullock-carts or in other capacities. Once there, and liking the life of vagabondage, with just enough work to keep them from starving, they had remained until high wages were offered, and their instinctive love of warfare tempted them to take service with the army” (102). Notwithstanding the fact that there is no reason not to trust the Black characters in the novel, the British officer could not bring himself to trust them. When one of the Black scouts gives an officer information on the enemy (the Boers), he is not taken seriously because “it is always difficult to rely upon Kaffir evidence; the man might never have gone that way at all, and might have got up his story as an excuse for not bringing in news” (143). And when Yorke asks Peter if he would go back to his people after the war is over, Peter replies: “‘I shall not do that, baas, as long as you will keep me. Some day I will go down and buy a wife, and build a little house near here. I have been so long in towns that I do not want to be a wild fellow again, and live in village kraals, and eat mealies, and have nothing to do but walk about and carry a gun on my shoulder. A stupid life that; much rather live with baas’“ (363), a passage which illustrates Yorke’s “redemptive” effect on Peter’s life. We should not forget that, like all Henty’s heroes, Yorke came to South Africa to make a fortune, at least to make a living. He is not as interested in stripes, as he is in economic pursuits. Henty’s imperialism, in fact, included recurring references to monetary gain. Patrick Dunae, in “Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Empire, 1870– 1914,” points out that although Henty’s books in general reflect imperial ideas, he particularly emphasized the economic gains that imperialism could effect. Apart from By Sheer Pluck, in which Henty dwelled on the missionary theme, “missionaries are eclipsed by entrepreneurs, civil servants, and military officials” in Henty’s other adventure tales (Dunae 109–10). This is particularly true when one considers Henty’s

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preoccupation with his hero acquiring enough fortune to begin a middle-class life after taking part in a war or an adventure. Early in With Roberts to Pretoria, before Yorke enlists in the army, Mr. Allnutt makes him his heir because Mr. Allnutt has no relation in the colony besides his wife: “‘I shall be ready to give you a thousand pounds to set you up in it. Or, if you decide that you would like to return home and settle in England, you will have that sum to pay your expenses at college…’“ (59). Yorke tells Mr. Chambers quite honestly his reasons for coming out to South Africa: “‘I have come out here, as I frankly told you, in order to make money. My father’s income as a clergyman will die with him; and above all things I am anxious to be able to assure the future of my mother and sisters’“ (358). Yorke fulfills his dream when Mr. Chambers offers him a gift of twelve thousand five hundred pounds to “‘enable [him] to ensure the future of those dear to you’“ (359). It was not the end of the war that brought the hero’s adventure to a close, but fortune, since Yorke resigns from the military even before the end of the war. Patrick Dunae’s assertion that Henty himself was a shareholder in several overseas economic ventures, including the Transvaal Gold Mining and Estates Company in South Africa, is quite telling (Dunae 110). Although he firmly believed in the British empire, Henty’s interest in empire was noticeably linked to the financial gains the empire could yield. NOTES 1. Robert Baden-Powell was among the concerned patriots who found the roots of the moral decay in civilization itself. He suggested that the colonies could easily offer the solution to an “overcivilized” society. As he saw it, civilization drains energy, “with its town life, buses, hot-and-cold-water laid on, everything done for you,” and makes “men soft and feckless…God made men to be men” [quoted in MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 5). Born in 1857, Baden-Powell joined the military service at the age of nineteen mainly because he could not get admittance to Balliol College, the college of his choice. (Fast 22–24). In India and Africa, he developed skills in the military (following trails and wearing disguises) that later culminated in the making of the Boy Scouts. It was partly the siege and the consequent relief of Mafeking in South Africa that motivated Baden-Powell to conceive the idea of the Boy Scout movement. During the 217 days of the siege of

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Mafeking, Baden-Powell used African juveniles and a corps of British youngsters as spies. According to Fast, Baden-Powell might have thought during the siege: “When this is over, I’ll want to find more boys like these—boys who can be made into something real and fine by the simple method of giving them responsibility and duty” (144). The relief of Mafeking was also perceived as a triumph at home, and Queen Victoria sent a telegram to Baden-Powell. It read: “I and my whole Empire greatly rejoice at the relief of Mafeking, after a splendid defense made by you through all these months. I heartily congratulate you and all under you, military and civil, British and native, for the heroism and devotion you have shown” (quoted in Fast 159). 2. Apparently, these qualities enhanced business as well as defined the middle-class in a better light vis-à-vis the landed aristocracy. Thus middle-class parents were confident and eager to send their children to be trained in public schools where they could enhance their social status. But at the same time, public schools such as Rugby served as a means to “civilize the squirearchy” and to respond to the call for imperial duty, seen as a true test of manliness (Roper and Tosh 46).

CHAPTER 6

Henty’s Literary Compatriots Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad

It “was in 1868, when I was nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of the continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: “When I grow up I shall go there.” —Joseph Conrad

Haggard, essentially a humanist, is not content with the answer of “God”; he seeks to know His nature, he seeks to prove Him. His gropings into Egyptian and Nordic archaeology, his scrapings in prehistoric temples and tombs, his toying with spiritualism and psychical phenomena, his strong belief in reincarnation—all are pan of his quest for answers. —Morton Norton Cohen

Henty died in 1902, the year Conrad published his Heart of Darkness. The novel that won Haggard worldwide acclaim, King Solomon’s Mines (1884), was published about the same time Henty’s reputation as the favorite boys’ writer was established. Haggard and Conrad were born a year apart, respectively in 1856 and 1857, but the former published his works alongside Henty. In other words, Henty and Haggard could be classified as late-nineteenth-century contemporary writers, 137

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and Conrad as a late-nineteenth-early twentieth-century one. This demarcation is important mainly because as we move from Henty’s works to those of Haggard and Conrad, we notice a change in the representation of the Other—in the way these writers conveyed their views on empire. While Henty delights in Hughes’s muscular Christianity and the cult of the “schoolboy-master-of-the-world.”1 Haggard and Conrad battle with human beings’ “nearness to apes.” The journey motif in the works of Haggard and Conrad amounts to what Daniel Bivona, in Desire and Contradiction, calls a “historical return”—a return to the characters’ and authors’ supposed savage past believed to have been located in the “adventure land” inhabited by the Other, thus suggesting a connection between the past (the Other or savagery) and the present (the Self or civilization). Bivona notes that this return has political ramifications because the “privilege of returning is often only enabled by the existence of world-wide European empires and the selfconfident proprietary attitudes which they engender” (77). This historical return to the past raises questions as to the very origins of European civilization. In other words, if one adhered to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinian era (as these writers did), then where could European civilization have originated? Could it have been in Africa where the first human was supposed to have lived? Obviously this was a very disturbing question for late Victorians—a question that called for a reexamination of Victorian values (Bivona 76). While eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke defined civilization as “what savagery is not,” the nineteenth-century saw the savage as the progenitor of civilization. For instance, the narrator of Haggard’s Allan Quatermain voices his disgust with “civilization”— specifically English civilization—in these terms: “This prim English country, with its prim hedgerows and cultivated fields…now for several years I have lived here in England, and have in my own stupid manner done my best to learn the ways of the children of the light… and found civilization is only savagery silver-gilt…. It is on the savage that we fall back in emergencies…. Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted” (16). Of course Haggard had been largely influenced by Darwinism. In Darwinism in the English Novel, Leo Henkin argued that the fin de siècle saw the proliferation of what he called the “evolutionary romance” that embraced the “anthropological romance, dealing with the prehistoric past and vestiges of that past in the present, the romance of eccentric evolution…and the romance of the future” (173).

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The romance of the future, according to Henkin, “is further supplemented by suggestive hints of what future man may become, presented in a series of novels dealing with the evolution of man-like species in other worlds, other planets” (173). More often than not, the theme in these works is the “discovery of the ‘missing link,’ not in fossil form, but alive” (178). While referring to British imperialism vis-à-vis Africa as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human race,” Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, explores, among other things, “what future man may become,” as exemplified in the character of Kurtz. This chapter takes a critical look at these anthropological romances, and their contribution to the novels of empire. My specific references will be Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1885) Rider Haggard’s biographer, Morton Cohen, contends that Haggard’s father, William Meybohm Rider Haggard, is still talked about in the village of Bradenham, Norfolk, as the “Old Squire” who ruled “with a loud voice, an impetuous nature, and a capricious disposition” (21). Born on June 22, 1856, in the Wood Farm (a farmhouse on the Haggard estate), Rider was the eighth often children, a weak and jaundiced child (not unlike Henty) who nevertheless grew to be healthy and robust. He grew up in Bradenham where, although his parents were well educated and books abounded in the house and nursery, life centered on “external and practical reality, not…metaphysical speculation” (Cohen 22). In his thirties, Rider reflected on his childhood years in these terms: Now to be frank, I have never been a very great reader…and besides, I have always preferred to try to study human character from life rather than in the pages of books…. [But] when I was a boy I loved those books that other boys love…. I well remember a little scene which took place when I was a child of eight or nine. “Robinson Crusoe” held me in his golden thrall, and I was expected to go to church. I hid beneath a bed with “Robinson Crusoe,” and was in due course discovered by an elder sister and a governess, who, on my refusing to come out resorted to force. Then followed a struggle that was quite Homeric. The two ladies tugged as best they might, but I clung to “Crusoe” and the legs of the bed, and kicked till, perfectly exhausted, they took their departure in no very Christian frame of mind, leaving me panting indeed, but triumphant, (quoted in Cohen 22–23)

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Haggard probably “clung to Crusoe” all his life, in that most of his adventure tales could be read as adaptations of Robinson Crusoe. As Martin Green points out, the “anxiety of possession noted in Robinson Crusoe was an individual thing; by the time of Wells and Haggard it was national” (Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire 234). Probably Haggard was still living on Crusoe’s imaginary island because when he was sent to a day school at the age of ten, he did so poorly that his father ridiculed him as “only fit to be a greengrocer” (Cohen 23). Haggard’s own daughter later remarked that her father was “considered not to be very bright” (Cohen 23–25). But Haggard’s sensitivity and imaginative abilities became evident the first time he tried his hand at fiction. Haggard recalled: My very first attempt at imaginative writing was made while I was a boy at school. One of the masters promised a prize to that youth who should best describe on paper any incident, real or imaginary. I entered the lists, and selected the scene at an operation in a hospital as my subject. The fact that I have never seen an operation, nor crossed the doors of a hospital, did not deter me from this bold endeavour, which, however, was justified by its success. I was declared to have won in the competition, though, probably through the forgetfulness of the master, I remember that I never received the promised prize.” (quoted in William Bryce, Half-Hours with Famous Writers for Boys 76)

Probably because he wanted Haggard to become more than a greengrocer, Haggard’s father wrote to a family friend, Sir Henry Bulwer, recently appointed as lieutenant-governor of Natal, South Africa, and asked him to take Haggard with him. At nineteen, in August 1875, Haggard arrived at the Cape Colony as a member of Henry Bulwer’s staff. Haggard’s arrival in South Africa coincided with the troubled times in the history of that country. With the defeat of the Boers by Sekhukhune and the Zulus’ threat to invade the Transvaal, the British offered military and financial support to the Boers, and in return the British annexed the Transvaal. Haggard thought the annexation, which took place on April 12, 1877, was inevitable “[a]s they [Boers] could not govern themselves and were about to plunge South Africa into a bloody war, our intervention was necessary” (quoted in Katz 9). It was Haggard himself who “ran up the British flag” on that day (Katz 9). In June of the same year Haggard (who hitherto had been in charge of hiring servants, purchasing food supplies, and the like) was appointed English clerk to the Colonial Secretary’s Office, and he later became

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Master and Registrar of the High Court of the Transvaal (Katz 9). The British, now allies of the Boers, invaded Zululand but were defeated. After the British defeat by the Zulus at the battle of Isandhlwana in January 1879, Haggard joined the Pretoria Horse, a mounted patrol corps (Katz 10). In spite of British victory over the Zulus in August thanks to the Pretoria Horse, Haggard decided to give up his job in the colonial administration, and while he was making plans to move from Pretoria and turn to ostrich farming (after he had gone home to “bring a certain love affair to a head by a formal engagement”), his father wrote to dissuade him. He reluctantly stayed in Pretoria and resumed work, but before long his fiancée jilted him. Emotionally devastated, he resigned from his job, this time without letting his father influence his decision (Cohen 49). Haggard and Arthur Cochrane, a young man he had befriended in South Africa, bought a house they called Hilldrop, about two hundred miles from Pretoria, where they began their ostrich farm. Shortly after, Haggard left for England where he met and married Louisa Margitson, a propertied orphan (Cohen 49–55). While in England he attempted to regain his post as Master and Registrar of the High Court in Pretoria, but Sir Garnet Wolseley, then Commissioner for southeast Africa, refused to reinstate him (Katz 10). Meanwhile, Cochrane’s letters were depressing: most of the ostriches had died, the crops had failed, and the oxen had gone “down with lung sickness.” Besides, there was political upheaval: the Boers were threatening to reverse the annexation and overthrow the British. In November 1880, despite the turmoil, Haggard, his wife, and a maid sailed for Durban (Cohen 56–57). The British defeat at the battle of Majuba Hill in 1881 was a decisive point for the Haggards, who auctioned off their household furniture and returned to England. According to Morton Cohen, Haggard wished he could take his devoted servant, Mazooku, “back with him to civilization,” only this was “obviously impractical” (Cohen 62). Consequently, “the best he could do would be to bring him back in the stories he was later to write” (Cohen 62). Back in England Haggard read for the bar, and published his first novel Cetywayo and His White Neighbours (1882), an account of the events that led up to the annexation. The book drew the following reaction from Lord Carnarvon: The English public was so deceived by misrepresentations of the annexation of the Transvaal that the real history was never understood; and the humiliating surrender of it was accepted in partial ignorance at least

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of the facts…. I am grateful to anyone who has the courage to say what really did occur, (quoted in Katz 12)

Dawn, Haggard’s second novel, appeared in February 1884, followed by The Witch’s Head (1884). But the book that established his reputation as an adventure novelist was King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885. This novel materialized as a result of Haggard’s brother’s challenge to him that he couldn’t write anything close to Treasure Island, a book Haggard thought was not as outstanding as many seemed to argue. In six weeks Haggard finished his tale of an “African” adventure. After reading the manuscript W.E.Henley passed it to Andrew Lang, editor of Harper’s and an anthropologist, who wrote the following to Haggard: “Seldom have I read a book with so much pleasure: I think it perfectly delightful…. There is so much invention and imaginative power and knowledge of the African character in your book that I almost prefer it to Treasure Island” (quoted in Cohen 86). Between January 1885 and March 1886 Haggard wrote Allan Quatermain, Jess, and She, but King Solomon’s Mines remained the favorite as the sales indicated: in England it sold 31,000 copies during the first year, and has never been out of print since. In the United States thirteen different editions appeared by the end of the year. Not only was King’s Solomon’s Mines a best-seller, it was considered an authentic document. In fact the story is told of a jewel dealer who approached the author with the intention of sending an expedition to look for the legendary Solomon’s Mines! (Cohen 94) When he died in 1925, Haggard left behind him “forty-two romances, twelve contemporary novels, and ten works of non-fiction” (Ellis 2). In his H.Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite, Peter Ellis argues that Haggard was the “imperial adventurer, a social reformer…a public servant who served on several royal commissions” in matters such as afforestation and the “settlement of the poor of industrial England in the colonies.” More importantly, Ellis maintains that it was Haggard’s “exposition of the evolutionary idea and repudiation of the popular and arrogant notion of the ‘white man’s burden’“ that showed Haggard’s disdain for the “cultural exclusiveness which was part and parcel of the myth of the Victorian British Empire” (2–3). He asserts that Haggard’s tales “remain remarkably free from the racial prejudices to which many of his contemporaries succumbed” (3). Given the connection between empire, adventure, and race it is absurd to argue (as Ellis does) that

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Haggard’s tales remain free of racial prejudices. I intend to show that the imperial agenda is at the very heart of King Solomon’s Mines. This adventure tale opens aboard the Dunkeld bound for Natal, South Africa. Aboard the ship are the narrator Allan Quatermain (a hunter residing in Natal), Henry Curtis (an English gentleman), and Captain John Good (a former naval officer). Henry Curtis is on his way to Natal in search of his younger brother George with whom he seeks reconciliation after a bitter quarrel. All we know about George is that he has embarked on a trip to the interior in search of the legendary King Solomon’s Mines—that is, fortune. Quatermain agrees to lead the expedition because of his knowledge of the country, but reveals to them that no one has ever succeeded in reaching the mines alive. In fact Quatermain does possess an old map drawn in blood by a Portuguese adventurer, José Da Silvestra, who died in 1590 on his way to the mines. The search for George Curtis also becomes the search for the mines, which George had been endeavoring to find. Meanwhile, Umbopa joins the adventurers; he had come from the north to Zululand in hopes of seeing the “white man’s ways.” Umbopa’s real name is Ignosi, a prince whose father (heir to the throne of the Kukuana people) had been murdered by his jealous brother Twala, who then assumed power. Pursued by Twala, Ignosi and his mother fled, but the latter died during the long march across the desert. The Englishmen become interested in Umbopa’s story, and on their arrival in Kukuanaland agree to enthrone Umpoba (Ignosi), the rightful successor. Twala, a bloodthirsty and despotic ruler, is suspicious of the party that arrives at his village that day, and dares not trust their motives until the English prove their superiority by shooting an elephant with a rifle, and later by claiming that an eclipse results from the “white man’s magic.” The inevitable battle to enthrone Ignosi takes place, and Twala and his warriors are defeated. Gagool, Twala’s witch doctor, is spared because she has knowledge of the mines. The narrator gives a vivid description of the gothic atmosphere of the cave where the treasure is located. Gagool takes the Englishmen to the cave where they appropriate diamonds and gold, but the cave closes in on them and Gagool is killed. The Englishmen make their way out of the cave, and on their return to Natal, accidentally find George (who had been lamed in his attempts to reach the mines two years earlier) and his Zulu servant, Jim. George and Jim “had lived for nearly two years, like a second Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday” (284). Henry, George, and Good leave for England where they market

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their treasures. They also write to encourage Quatermain to join them because the value of the treasure is unquestionably enormous, capable of making them the richest men in the world. Despite Haggard’s appreciation of, and admiration for the Zulu military, perhaps as a result of his relative familiarity with the Zulus, he was still a believer in the “imperial mission.” Some critics take the opposite view—for example, Morton Cohen, Peter Ellis, and Alan Sandison see no racial prejudice, so characteristic of Victorian “writers of empire,” in Haggard’s novels. On the other hand, Wendy Katz’s Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire is a compelling analysis of Haggard’s works. Katz’s book makes the “cultural relativity” that Cohen, Ellis, and Sandison attribute to Haggard seem superficial. Ignosi’s enthronement, the first “benevolent” act on the part of the Englishmen in King Solomon’s Mines is, in itself, indicative of the white man’s burden. Ignosi would not have been enthroned as the legitimate leader of his people without the help of the Englishmen, Curtis, Quatermain, and Good. In other words, we are led to believe that the Kukuana people would not have known “law and order” had the British not intervened. In this story the Englishmen are looked up to as demigods. Infadoos, Ignosi’s uncle, who had previously been serving under Twala, now a dissident, tells his supporters: “‘The white lords from the stars, looking down on the land, had perceived its trouble, and determined, at great personal inconvenience, to alleviate its lot’“ (174). After the battle, Infadoos “addressed Sir Henry [who finished off Twala] with a kind of reverence, as though he were something more than man” (221). Quatermain notes that the “great Englishman was looked on throughout Kukuanaland as a supernatural being” (221). When Ignosi is unsuccessful in convincing the White men to remain in his country, he ironically reminds them that he is not unaware of the White man’s mercenary motives: “‘Now do I perceive,’“ Ignosi tells them, “‘that it is the stones that ye love more than me, your friend. Ye have the stones; now would ye go to Natal and cross the Black water and sell them, and be rich, as it is the desire of a white man’s heart…’“ (274). Before he takes office, Ignosi promises the Englishmen that he will put an end to witchhunting in which witches are supposedly smelled out and killed: “‘The ways of black people are not as the ways of white men,’“ he says, “‘nor do we hold life so high as ye. Yet will I promise it. If it be in my power to hold them back, the witch finders shall hunt no more, nor shall any man die the death without

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judgment’“ (162). The following incident sheds further light on the white man’s burden. Foulata, a young girl, is about to be sacrificed, because according to the customs of the Kukuana people the “fairest girl” must be put to death at the “dance of maidens.” The English gentlemen are invited to the dance, and as Foulata runs for her life she grabs Captain Good and cries for help in somewhat biblical language: “‘Oh white father from the stars, throw over me the mantle of thy protection; let me creep into the shadow of thy strength, that I may be saved’“ (168). Haggard juxtaposes these qualities, which are supposedly British, with overgeneralizations about the natives throughout the novel. In Sandison’s attempts to defend Haggard in The Wheel of Empire, he offers an interesting idea, which, when carried further, speaks to Darwin’s continuing influence. Sandison points out that two words are crucial to any criticism of Haggard’s works: process and purpose. He argues that “process acknowledges Haggard’s acute feeling of things being in a state of flux and change,” and “purpose” speaks to his “lasting preoccupation with the question of design in nature, with whether or not there was a Providence which ordered things” (26). How does King Solomon’s Mines reflect the author’s alleged belief in “change” and “design”? The theory of divine order or purpose is closely related to the very notion and core of British imperialism: the belief that the building of the British empire was God’s design, a duty which the British could not evade. When in King Solomon’s Mines, Quatermain decides to take Henry Curtis and Captain Good on the seemingly dangerous trip to Kukuanaland, his words echo this predetermined order of things: “‘I am a fatalist,’“ he says, “‘and believe that my time is appointed to come quite independently of my own movements, and that if I go to Suliman Mountains to be killed, I shall go there and shall be killed there. God Almighty, no doubt, knows his mind about me, so I need not trouble on that point’“ (40). Wendy Katz points out that Haggard’s heroes are not “so much born to lead as born to follow and answer the call of their destiny. The Englishman’s destiny had called him to build the Empire, and the proof for this destiny was in the fact of the Empire itself (86). Closely connected with the idea of “purpose” and divine order was that of “process,” as mentioned earlier. Granted Darwin’s evolutionary theory, at what point in time and by what process did the British become the empire-builders? Is the journey motif to the “old World”

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in King Solomon’s Mines a historical journey or return in search of the Missing Link—a search for the “unrepressed savage” side of the nowcivilized Victorians? According to Daniel Bivona the “modern” or “civilized” dichotomy in the works of writers such as Haggard and Andrew Lang was being defined toward the end of the century as “the state of experiencing the loss of one’s ‘primitiveness,’ a rupture with the past which condemns one to return to the primitive world of the present to recover one’s bearings” (77). Hence, the cave in King Solomon’s Mines can symbolize the past, an ancient civilization that could be the site of the Missing Link. One could argue that the journey to Kukuanaland and into the cave reveals to the British how far they have come from their savage ancestors. For instance, despite the narrator’s admiration for the Zulu and Kukuana soldiers whom he compares with Roman soldiers, their practices remain those of primitive people. Cannibalism, human sacrifice, and tyranny are commonplace in King Solomon’s Mines. Twala is described as the “One-eyed, the Black, the Terrible,” as though one-eyed, Black and Terrible were synonymous. He delights in the slaughter of his citizens without any concern for due process. He tells the Englishmen invited to watch a witchhunt: “‘Kisses of and the tender words of women are sweet, but the sound of clashing of men’s spears, and the smell of men’s blood, are far sweeter!’“ (163). Twala and his entourage appear to be that link between the ape and humans, the Missing Link. The following is an elaborate description of Twala, his son Scragga, and Gagool (the witch doctor): At length the door of the hut opened, and a gigantic figure, with splendid tiger-skin kaross flung over its shoulders, stepped out, and the boy Scragga, and what appeared to us to be a withered-up monkey wrapped in a fur cloak. The figure seated itself upon a stool, Scragga took his stand behind it, and the withered-up monkey crept on all fours into the shade of the hut and squatted down…Then the gigantic figure slipped off the kaross and stood before us, a truly alarming spectacle. It was that of an enormous man with the most entirely repulsive countenance we had ever beheld. The lips were as thick as a negro’s, the nose was flat, it had but one gleaming black eye (for the other was represented by a hollow in the face), and its whole expression was cruel and sensual to a degree. (130)

From the above passage, Twala and his entourage appear similar to monsters. Twala seems half human, half beast, a missing link between the apes and humans, the British.

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Taking into consideration the fact that King Solomon’s Mines was inspired by the uncovering of the ruins of an ancient kingdom in Zimbabwe (Cohen 108), the journey undertaken by Curtis, Good, and Quatermain illustrates this return to the past to “recover one’s bearings.” Not surprisingly it is Umbopa, not the British, who reinforces Darwin’s evolutionary theory: “What is life? Tell me, O white men, who are wise, who know the secrets of the world, and the world of stars, and the world that lies above and around the stars…tell me, white men, the secret of our life— whither it goes and whence it comes! Ye cannot answer; ye know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the nighttime and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in the winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.” (65–66)

Referring to Umbopa’s eloquence, Henry points out that despite their “vain repetitions” the Kukuana people are “by no means devoid of poetic instinct and intellectual power” (65). By conveying the Darwinian theory of the origin of the species and the purpose of life through Umbopa, Haggard shows that the savage could not have been very far removed in time from the civilized, since both share the same opinions on certain fundamental issues such as the essence and purpose of life. Before the final battle against Twala’s army, Quatermain highlights the notion of “divine order” and of “purpose” when he reflects on the impending death Twala’s soldiers would inevitably face in the following terms: “it could not be otherwise; they were being condemned…. [T]hey were foredoomed to die, and they knew it. It was to be their task to engage regiment after regiment of Twala’s army on the narrow strip of green beneath us, till they were exterminated” (198). One could argue that, just as the soldiers are “foredoomed to die,” the British are also foredoomed to take on the duty of enlightening others. But Haggard might have been alluding to the extermination of the “weaker species,” as stipulated by the “Socialist Darwinist idea of the survival of the fittest” (Katz 85–86). The archeological findings in Zimbabwe—proof of ancient civilizations worthy of respect—might have posed a serious threat to the assumed superiority of British civilization. Through Gagool, Haggard

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attempts to attribute the vestiges of the cave to “the white man”: “‘I am old! I am old!’“ says Gagool, “‘How old am I, think ye? Your fathers knew me, and their fathers knew me, and their fathers’ fathers. I have seen the white man, and know his desires. I am old, but the mountains are older than I. Who made the great road, tell me? Who wrote in pictures on the rocks, tell me?…. Ye know not, but I know. It was a white people who were before ye were, who shall be when you are not, who shall eat you up and destroy you’“ (137–38). That these Englishmen know nothing about this cave, its paintings and drawings, and that they are informed by Gagool indicates that the art, the paintings in the cave, and “Solomon’s Road” are either of ancient Egypt, the Sudan, or Zimbabwe, historical sites of great ancient civilizations. Haggard’s biographer Morton Cohen argues that in Haggard’s “African” tales, the ancient Zimbabwe, a city inhabited by white men, was intended to appeal to “the young Englishman’s imagination” (109). But the point here is that he did this at the expense of the Africans, perpetuating the myth that without Europe civilization would be an unknown concept to Africa: he denied the Africans cultural and historical representation. Is it a coincidence that in the 1990s, more than a century after the publication of King Solomon’s Mines, Egyptians are classified in the United States as whites, despite their objection?2 When Gagool tells the Englishmen that the people who built the treasures they are about to steal would “eat them up,” she could be alluding to the destruction of British civilization by savage customs. As Brantlinger points out, the adventure stories of the late Victorian and Edwardian culture, the “imperial Gothic novels, express anxieties about the waning of religious orthodoxy, but even more clearly [they express] anxieties about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery and thus about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony” (229). Brantlinger identifies “regression” or “going native” as one of the themes in the imperial Gothic (230). In Stephen Arata’s words, there was a possibility and fear of “reverse colonization” (Arata 623). In this case, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) better illustrates this theory since Dracula’s victims “go native,” and “going native” includes “blood-mixing” (Arata 623). Haggard’s views on racial mixing (miscegenation) as well as on social intercourse in a broad sense, are treated explicitly in his fiction. In King Solomon’s Mines, the narrator handles socio-cultural intermingling or miscegenation in a Darwinian fashion. The survival-of-

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the-fittest theory, in itself, forbids the mixing of the weak and the fit. When Twala suggests that Good, Quatermain, and Curtis choose their brides among his people, the narrator reminds us that “the prospect did not seem to be without attractions to Good, who was, like most sailors, of a susceptible nature. I, being elderly and wise, and foreseeing the endless complications that anything of the sort would involve (for women bring trouble as surely as the night follows the day), put in a hasty answer: ‘Thanks, O king, but we white men wed only with white women like ourselves. Your maidens are fair, but they are not for us!” (163–64). When Foulata, whom the Englishmen had earlier saved from Twala’s death squad, is dying in the cave, she expresses her affection for Captain Good who, in turn, is very fond of her. But Foulata is unable to bring herself to contemplate the possibility of such a union with an Englishman: “‘Say to my lord…. I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black…. Say that if I live again, mayhem I shall see him in the stars, and that—I will search them all, though perchance I should there still be black and he would—still be white’“ (254). Here, besides the issue of miscegenation, there is also Haggard’s concern with reincarnation: whether in this process White people would “live again” as Whites or Blacks, and vice-versa. In The Days of My Life, Haggard discusses what he calls “glimpses of his own previous existences” in which he is a primitive man in the first reincarnation, “perhaps of the Stone Age; in the second he is black, again primitive, defending his rude home against attackers who kill him; in the third he is an ancient Egyptian,” and in the fourth he is “probably an early medieval barbarian” (quoted in Brantlinger 244). Wendy Katz asserts that Haggard’s “spiritualism and fatalism… did not contribute to his supposed cultural relativism but to his real racism,” and that his antimissionary stance does not come from his own unorthodox religious views, but from a disapproval of “social intercourse between races and cultures” (135–36). In King Solomon’s Mines, when the Englishmen decide to leave Ignosi, the latter is disappointed because he supposedly values their service in his kingdom. When they insist on leaving, Ignosi gives them a speech which could be viewed as antimissionary or anti-imperialist: “But listen, and let all the white men know my words. No other white man shall cross the mountains, even if any may live to come so far. I

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will see no traders with their guns and rum. My people shall fight with the spear and drink water like their forefathers before them. I will have no praying men to put fear of death into men’s hearts, to stir them against their king, and make a path for the white men who follow to run on…. None shall ever come for the shining stones.” (275)

Ignosi’s speech on the surface appears to be anticapitalist, antiimperialist, and antimissionary, but it is important to note that he does not bar the Englishmen from coming back, because “‘for ye three, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan [their African names] the path is always open’“ (275). In other words, the British are the only Europeans allowed to exploit the resources of Kukuanaland and colonize the people. Hence the British could reassure themselves that the heydays of the empire were not over yet, thus resolving that anxiety over the future of their empire. The economic possibilities the colonies offer are clear: George Curtis leaves home to make his fortune in South Africa, and the trio of Quatermain, Henry, and Good who seek him all but forget about the initial objective of their adventure once they become aware of the prospects of Solomon’s mines. White minority-rule in southern Africa, especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa, are examples of what such European economic appetite could lead to. The economic rape of the colonies is illustrated by “sexualizing” the Kukuana landscape. For instance, José da Silvestra, the first European who tried to reach the mines, had named the two mountains where the diamonds are located Sheba’s Breasts. References to nipples and Sheba’s Breasts abound in the narrative. In Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World, Joseph Bristow argues that this representation is consistent with Victorian racist and sexist views:3 “as Europe is to Africa so is man to woman.” He notes that Haggard “equates whiteness with male power, and blackness with female weakness” (133). Ironically, when it becomes known to the Englishmen that there are secrets governing the treasures, and that they cannot get out of the cave, the narrator muses: “Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last” (258). Whether one is interested in finding “one’s bearings,” in search of diamonds, or of an earthly paradise in Kukuanaland, the messages of empire and British hegemony, no matter how contradictory and inconsistent, are loud and clear. And, despite some few instances where the Zulu or the Kukuana people are praised for their bravery, Haggard was a firm

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believer in the empire, and in King Solomon’s Mines he failed to transcend in any form the prejudices of his era. HEART OF DARKNESS (1902) Joseph Conrad was born on December 3, 1857, of Polish parents, and christened Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. Although born into the respectable gentry of Poland, Conrad became a person without a country at a very early age. His country had been divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772, and then again in 1793 and 1795. His father, Apollo, fought for the independence of Poland, but was arrested in 1861 and exiled to the village of Vologda, north of Moscow. Evelina, Conrad’s mother, died of tuberculosis due to the rigors of exile in 1865, and in 1869 Apollo also died (Murfin 3–4). “Conrad’s early childhood,” Leo Gurko writes, “isolated in an enemy country, cut off from young companions, thrown into the exclusive company of two parents dying visibly before his eyes, exposed him to abnormal tension” (Gurko 10–11). Tedeusz, his maternal uncle, took charge of his orphaned nephew and sent him to school in Krakow and Geneva. But young Conrad could not concentrate on school and asked Uncle Tadeusz to allow him to join the French merchant navy. He left school, but a passion for geography and “open horizons” had already been implanted in him by his “discovery” of the memoirs of Mungo Park and Captain Cook. He read books on travel and exploration, and devoured the sea adventures of Hugo, Marryat, and James Fenimore Cooper. (Gurko 12–13). He later sailed to the West Indies and Venezuela, and became involved in gun-dealing ventures. In 1878, for reasons not fully understood, young Conrad attempted suicide. But his troubles were far from being over, for that same year French immigration authorities denied him work as a sailor on French marine vessels. He left for England and became a British subject in 1886, the year he wrote his first short story “The Black Mate.” For sixteen years he sailed on British ships, but the “voyage that seems to have had the greatest impact…was not by sea at all”; it was “the expedition that saw Conrad far up the Congo River on a rusty steamboat with a shrill whistle” (Murfin 4–5). The Congo, by the time it entered Conrad’s experiences was the Belgian Congo. In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium, foreseeing the rivalry among European nations over the Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), convoked a meeting in Brussels which ironically made

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the Congo L’Etat Indépendant du Congo (“the Congo Free State”). It is ironic because this decision in Brussels rather marked the effective subjugation of the people of the Congo, and not their freedom from imperialism. After the Berlin West African Conference of 1884–1885, the Congo became Leopold’s personal property on condition that there would be free trade in the Congo, and that goods would be tax and tariff free. But Leopold did not observe all the clauses, and even after willing the Congo to Belgium against a government loan of 150 million francs, he appropriated the Congo until his death in 1908. It is noteworthy that the commissioners who governed the sixteen districts into which Leopold divided the Congo built their personal fortunes on taxes in the form of forced labor. Conrad’s decision to go to the Congo came partly as a fulfillment of his childhood dream, and partly as a result of his financial difficulties, since he had used up his inheritance by the time he was twenty-one. On June 12, 1890, Conrad arrived in the Congo only to find out from the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo that The Florida he had been contracted to command had sunk; to his deep disappointment, he agreed to become a sailor on Roi des Belges. This was inevitably a serious blow to the aspiring young captain who returned to England broken in health and spirit. His short sojourn in the Congo (precisely the trip on Roi des Belges with Delacommune, manager of a trading station in Kinshasha, to transport a dying agent named Klein) furnished the material for Heart of Darkness. By 1902, the year in which Heart of Darkness appeared, Conrad had already published Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of “Narcissus,” and Lord Jim. (Murfin 5–11). Aboard a steamboat anchored on the Thames, Marlow, a passenger, recounts a journey he had taken on another river, more specifically the Congo. The other fictional passengers are the narrator, an accountant, a lawyer, and the owner of the boat to whom Marlow tells his adventure into the “heart of darkness.” There is great similarity between Conrad’s own journey to the Belgian Congo and Marlow’s in Heart of Darkness. Through his aunt’s connections, as Conrad himself had done, Marlow secures a job as commander of a river steamer in the Congo (Gurko 13–14). On his arrival, he is told the steamer has sunk. Traveling in the region, Marlow is brought face-to-face with the greed that attended capitalist imperialism, and he becomes increasingly disgusted with what he calls the “conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion

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or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” (69). Marlow hears of Kurtz, a successful ivory dealer in the hinterland, who is up for promotion but seriously ill. Kurtz’s success had bred jealousy among other agents who would prefer him dead. After the repairs to the boat are completed, Marlow, accompanied by the district manager, sails into the interior toward Kurtz who lies dying—an episode reminiscent of H.M. Stanley’s search for the “lost” David Livingstone in East Africa. The journey toward Kurtz was adventurous, indeed, as the natives attack the boat and kill a native helmsman. At the Inner Station Marlow meets a young Russian who informs him about Kurtz and the respect his name commands among the indigenous population. The Russian tells Marlow that Kurtz had killed for ivory and had indeed become a complete savage. Apparently, it was Kurtz who had ordered the attack on Marlow’s boat earlier, so he could be left to die among his “fellow savages.” With his education and gun, Kurtz has built an empire he cannot part with. Attempts to take Kurtz back home are lost labor, as he dies on the steamer bound for the Central Station. His last words are: “‘My ivory,…. My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my….’“ (121–22). Before he dies, Kurtz charges Marlow to deliver two packages, one to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs and the other to his fiancée. Back home, Marlow goes to visit Kurtz’s fiancée but lies to her, telling her that Kurtz had died with her name on his lips. Heart of Darkness illustrates one of the main themes of the imperial Gothic novel, that of “going native.”4 In fact, before Marlow sets off for the Congo, the doctor tells him: “‘I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there.’“ “‘And when they come back?’“ asks Marlow. “‘Oh I never see them,…and moreover, the changes take place inside, you know…. I have a little theory which you messieurs who go out there must help me to prove’“ says the doctor (75). Marlow, on seeing Kurtz, wants to know “what he [Kurtz] belonged to”; not what belonged to him, but “how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own” (121). Thus, the theory Marlow’s doctor sets out to prove is being put to the test by Conrad’s creation of Kurtz. Such a theory amounts to fantasy in my view, but constitutes the most damaging aspects of the novel, for it takes the barbarism of the so-called native as an established fact, and proceeds to look at the mechanism whereby this transformation of a European into a native occurs. Did he regress because of his contact with the natives (savages) in their primordial state, in the “heart of darkness,”

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or because his heart grew “dark” as a result of the inhumanity of his acquisitiveness? What makes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness an interesting work in the study of British imperialism is the author’s narrative strategy which leads one to separate the narrator, Marlow, and Conrad from the moral content of the story. Chinua Achebe raises this issue by arguing that “if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems… totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters” (10). In fact, one need not look far to make the connection between Kurtz, Marlow, and the narrator on the one hand, and Conrad’s own views regarding the people of the Congo on the other hand. Conrad’s first encounter with a Black person speaks to the author’s attitude toward people of African descent: A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards, (quoted in Raskin 143)

Since Marlow seems at times to be critical of imperialism, he may have told the story obliquely in order not to be openly critical of the beneficiaries of imperialism aboard the boat. Even so, like Haggard, the narrative voice denies the people of the Congo adequate representation. Conrad was not the first British writer to be critical of the civilizing mission itself, or the way it is carried out. Nonetheless, antiimperialist observations in a work, or a condemnation of the way the duty of the empire is carried out, do not add up to an anti-imperialist manifesto. It is important to call to mind that one European rationale for colonization was to abolish the slave trade in order to elevate the African to “humanity.” When King Leopold called the meeting in Brussels, his intention was to discuss a plan “to open to civilization the only part of our globe where Christianity has not yet penetrated and pierce the darkness which envelops the entire population” (quoted in Hennessy 13). We now know that the suppression of the slave trade—in which the Arabs had become the major players after the British abolished the trade in 1833—was meant to make the continent more peaceful for the exploitation of mineral resources, including ivory, for which the

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Congo was famous. As Brantlinger observes in Rule of Darkness, “instead of a noble war to end the slave trade, which is how Leopold and his agents justified their actions against the Arabs, a new system of slavery was installed in place of the old.” In fact the 1891–1894 war King Leopold’s forces waged against Arab slave traders made the headline news worldwide (261). The Congo became a fertile ground for European rivalry for raw materials and illicit trade exemplified by Charles Stokes’s execution. Caught gunrunning, Charles Stokes, British native, ex-missionary and ivory dealer, was executed by Captain Lothaire, a Belgian officer in January 1895. In short, the Congo was turbulent in many ways, but there was money to be made, generating more rivalry among the signatories at the Berlin West African Conference (Pakenham 586). Moreover, Leopold’s despotic rule over the Congo, providing him with slave labor and raw materials, is best illustrated in the following testimony of the people of the Congo interviewed by Consul Casement in 1893: Wild beasts—the leopards—killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost or died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white men to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and the soldiers said: “Go. You are only beasts yourselves. You are only Nyama (meat).” (quoted in Pakenham 585)

Referring to forced labor and other atrocities in the Belgian (or rather Leopold’s) Congo, a Swiss observer wrote: “If the chief does not bring the stipulated number of baskets [of raw rubber], soldiers are sent out, and the people are killed without mercy. As proof, parts of the body are brought to the factory. How often have I watched heads and hands being carried into the factory” (quoted in Brantlinger 261). Some have argued that the overall impact of colonization has not been negative since it brought to the colonized people technology and “development.” But why would something supposedly beneficial need to be forced on a people at gunpoint? The easy answer is that the would-be colonized people were not cognizant of what was good for them, given their ignorance and their savage and barbaric nature and culture. Assuming, then, that they “needed” to be enlightened by Christianity, commerce, and civilization, as David Livingstone had opined, what did Europe have to lose if their mission and agenda were not implemented? It later became obvious that the European powers wanted raw materials. The atrocities perpetrated against the inhabi-

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tants of the Congo were not isolated incidents, but rampant throughout the continent.5 Besides the obvious economic exploitation, it also appears that the colonizers believed that unless they took the initiative to root out the savagery thought to be characteristic of indigenous people, they were likely to be “invaded” in turn by the savages. This invasion would come, not because the savage would necessarily travel to the land of civilization (as in Dracula in which Dracula travels from Transylvania to London and infests English citizens), but that civilization would regress into barbarism, since Europe had already invaded Africa in the wake of the scramble. Achebe stipulates that it is commonplace in the West to discuss Heart of Darkness without taking into account its racist dimension, because “white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked” (12). Achebe’s point suggests that readers approach texts with their own cultural orientation, which determines what they can or cannot notice. Hence, it is quite possible that what Achebe calls racism could be easily overlooked by those not directly affected by it. I contend that the antiimperialist angle of Conrad’s narrative does not obliterate the negative representation of the people of the Congo. Assuming he wrote Heart of Darkness to condemn imperialism, then the question becomes: at what price did Conrad convey his anti-imperialist message to his readers? One of the frequently discussed themes of the novel focuses on the “realization” that the colonizer could actually “go native,” in other words, become a native/savage. Sir Harry Johnston remarked in his British Central Africa that “in reviewing all that has happened since Europeans settled in this part of Africa,” he has “been increasingly struck with the rapidity with which such members of the white race as are not of the best class, can throw over the restraints of civilization and develop into savages of unbridled lust and abominable cruelty” (68). As mentioned earlier, this concern, partly based on a belief in the Darwinian theory of evolution, has been articulated by many critics of Heart of Darkness. The novel lends itself to such a reading or interpretation: Conrad possibly meant for the reader to see Kurtz’s mental condition as reversion into savagery, given the author’s preoccupation “with the fluid boundary between the civilized and the primitive” (Bivona 79). Was Kurtz crawling on “all-fours” as a result of his isolation in the Congo, away from civilization, as the text would entice us to believe? I submit that Kurtz’s metamorphosis results instead from

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resorting to barbaric means to extract labor from an unwilling people. It seems clear to me that the idea of reversion in itself was another empty, self-justifying theory which twentieth-century readers should frown upon and reject. As Achebe has argued, the connection Marlow sees between the Thames and the Congo River is a ploy to question the very humanity of the people of the Congo (3–4). Marlow’s remark that the Thames “‘also has been one of the dark places of the earth’“ suggests some relationship between the Congo and the Thames, or between Africa and Europe—kinship. This connection could be viewed as sympathetic, in that both the Thames and the Congo had seen the barbaric ravages of colonial endeavor. The narrator informs us that “when the Romans first came here [England] nineteen hundred years ago—the other day—…light came out of this river” (68), implying that not only had both places experienced colonization, but that the Thames too had once lacked civilization or light, and that it was the Romans who brought light/civilization just as the British and the Belgians were bringing light or civilization to the Congo during the scramble for Africa. But if the Romans thought that the British were savages and needed to be enlightened or colonized, then the question becomes: Who is to tell who is or is not a savage? The power to define comes from the power to colonize. Then could the people of the Congo conceivably become colonizers? The answer is No, even historically. In the nineteenth century when the British became the leaders of the new imperialism, there was no hint of reverse colonization on the part of the Romans who had colonized them. But the late Victorian and Edwardian culture encouraged such thinking. In Heart of Darkness it becomes evident that not only does this “kinship” worry the narrator, as Achebe has shown, but the very humanity of the people of the Congo is called into question: We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness…. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grassroofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell?… We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember

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because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories… The earth seemed unearthly…. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman…. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrible faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future. (105–06)

This lengthy passage is worth quoting, for it is a clear-cut example of how Conrad dehumanizes the people of the Congo. It also illustrates the narrator’s indignation at the “thought of their humanity—like yours —the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.” Marlow’s observations here, no doubt, support the evolutionary theory, and the thought that these savages might be related to him, no matter how remotely, was troublesome for Marlow. This is a passage that speaks to the theme of regression in the imperial Gothic: “the mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future,” suggesting what Bivona called “the fluid boundary between civilized and the primitive” (77). This is how Marlow, his doctor, and Victorian empirebuilders justified their belligerence and their exploitation of others, and warned against reversion which could lead to a future decline of empire. But this theory is a flawed one: as an old adage would put it, this theory “amounts to taking a porous basket to fetch water from the river,” because it defeats the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest on which evolutionary and regression theories are founded. In other words, if one could actually revert to barbarism, then Kurtz’s regression proves that Europeans would not survive the test of natural selection: because Kurtz is not one of the “fittest” he does survive in the Congo. Marlow mourns the death of the Black helmsman not because Marlow thinks he is human, but only because he will miss the labor the helmsman provided: “‘Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account that a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It

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was a kind of partnership…and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment’“ (124). Again, although Marlow sympathizes with the helmsman, the realization that the savage, after all is human, and is somewhat related to Marlow, is not a comforting one. Marlow tells us that the “‘original Kurtz had been partly educated in England…his mother was half-English, his father was halfFrench.’“ Kurtz had written reports for The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, but this “‘must have been before his nerves went wrong and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites’“ (123). So, what caused Kurtz’s nerves to go wrong? There is an ironic correlation between Kurtz’s transformation and the way in which colonization had disfigured the African continent. When Marlow, like Conrad himself, was but a boy he had dreamed about traveling to Africa: “‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there”…. True by this time it was not a blank space anymore. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream over. It had become a place of darkness’“ (70–71). Africa had become a “place of darkness,” notes Brantlinger, because “Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light that was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of ‘savage customs’ in the name of civilization.” It became a place of darkness as the result of “the arrival of European slave traders who introduced…the characteristic products of civilization: avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare, and slavery” (176). Likewise, Kurtz’s mental condition, the “darkness of his heart,” is occasioned by these characteristics of the so-called civilized Europe. In other words, we could argue that Kurtz’s heart grew “dark” as a result of the tools of imperial enterprise he brought with him to the Congo. On nearing Kurtz’s house, Marlow sees human heads stuck on poles to serve as some sort of ornament: “‘They would have been more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been

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turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise…. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of the pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously’“ (133). According to Marlow, “‘there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts’“ (133). While there is nothing profitable about the heads being there, they serve as a constant reminder to Kurtz of his own power over the people from whom he took ivory, as a kind of trophy and an exhibition of his power. Marlow is “not so shocked,” and to him the heads only “showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint,” since he does not believe in the humanity of those whose heads hung on the poles in front of Kurtz’s house. To Marlow, Kurtz is a “remarkable man,” and the heads only show that Kurtz lacked restraint. Marlow does not seem to be concerned with the killing, but rather with the implications it has for Kurtz’s character or for other Europeans in the “land of darkness.” Kurtz’s lack of restraint drives him to murder in cold blood in order to hoard ivory. What does alleged African savagery have to do with this neurotic behavior? Nothing. Kurtz is a cold-blooded murderer, a man whose dying words concern his material possessions: “‘my ivory, my station, my river….’“ Therefore, Marlow’s intimation that Kurtz’s regression is caused by his isolation in “primordial” Africa is a smokescreen to mask the real colonial agenda: “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (99). The suggestion that Kurtz has reversed to barbarism might well seem ridiculous to the indigenous peoples whose milieu allegedly caused regression—who may well have their own theory regarding people who kill in cold blood. In certain West African cultures, people believe that the ghosts of the victims of cold-blooded murder return to haunt the perpetrator.6 In his In the Trickster Tradition, Peter Nazareth offers another alternative interpretation: “How do we know,” he argues, “that the mysterious illness that was killing Kurtz was not slow poisoning by the Africans?” (238). Given the brutality and cruelty of Kurtz’s enterprise, this interpretation is all the more convincing, because Africans, somehow, reacted to those brutalities. Marlow

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suggests this interpretation himself when he says, “‘the wilderness had found him [Kurtz] out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion’“ (99). As Stephen Arata argues, ”reverse colonization” (exemplified here by Kurtz’s illness) is often presented as “deserved punishment” and an atonement for “imperial sins” (623). According to Arata, “reverse colonization” narratives, which constitute a variation of the imperial Gothic, express “both fear and guilt”—the fear that “what has been presented as the ‘civilized’ is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces” (623). Because Africans resisted colonialism, agents of the colonial administration, like Kurtz, used barbaric means to extract wealth from Africa. One could argue that Marlow both endorses the duty of empire and is critical of the most brutal methods of extracting that wealth—criticism that could easily be taken for a repudiation of colonialism itself. And there is more in Heart of Darkness that implies an antiimperialist stance: there are scenes, for example, that mock the civilizing mission. These instances, however, do not redeem the work from my point of view. Although one may agree with Daniel Bivona’s suggestion that “Marlow’s narrativization of Kurtz is an act of ‘colonial mimicry,’“ (89) the authorial presence behind these characters is Conrad. The author chooses to perpetuate already existing myths and stereotypes through his inaccurate representation of the people of the Congo, who are not even given a voice in this work! Conrad, Bivona argues, “returns to the frame occasionally to reinforce parallels between Marlow (the ‘idol’) and Kurtz (the false god) which elaborate the transference, the uncanny interchangeability of Marlow and Kurtz” (89). In his article “Problematic Presence: The Colonial Other in Kipling and Conrad” John McClure concedes that “in order to preserve a domain of enchantment for himself and his European readers, Conrad has Marlow write ‘zone of the demonic’ across the ‘blank space’ of Africa, thus consigning the Africans to a familiar role of demonic ‘others.’ He sacrifices their need for adequate representation to his own need for mystery” (quoted in Dabydeen 162). “Whatever Conrad’s problems were,” Achebe writes, “he is now safely dead. Unfortunately, his heart of darkness plagues us still” (14). NOTES 1. This is a term used by G.D.Killam in his Africa in English Fiction,

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

1874–1939 to refer to the never-changing Henty hero, a product of the public school system. Mostafa Hefny, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Egypt is disputing his classification by the U.S. Department of Immigration as White. Hefny clarifies his position: “My complexion is as dark as most Black Americans. My features are clearly African…. Classification as it is done by the United States government provides Whites with legal ground to claim Egypt as a white civilization…. We are fools if we allow them to take this legacy away from us” (quoted in Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek 175–76). For a feminist critique of King Solomon’s Mines refer to chapter six of Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. Patrick Brantlinger has suggested that as the British empire was believed to be on the verge of its decline toward the end of the century, the “imperial Gothic” novels—adventure tales with Gothic elements—became the mirror for the anxieties about empire. He notes that the three principal themes of the imperial Gothic are “individual regression or going native, an invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism, and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the world” (230). As someone from a “postcolonial” country, I became aware of the brutal and barbaric killings of innocent people who were unable to produce the amount of the “required” raw material through my parents. In Togo (once a German colony, and later a French one), my grandparents and parents used to tell me stories of how the Germans would beat people to death for not producing enough kernel oil to be shipped to Germany. The bodies of those who died of exhaustion and beatings were taken out of trucks (transporting the bodies) only to be whipped, since the German colonial officials thought these men and women were lazy and unwilling to work on railroad construction to enable the shipping of coffee and cocoa to the coast. Interestingly enough, this motif is seen in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In this fictional slave narrative, a Cajun who is hired by white supremacists to kill a Black activist dies a slow but turbulent death, screaming all day and uttering incomprehensible words. The slaves-turned-sharecroppers attribute the manner in which the Cajun died to the life he had led;

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they believe his mind became invaded with the ghosts of his victims. This interpretation is no less credible than the regression theory, which seems geared toward an explanation of these anxieties of imperial domination.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion Legacy and Impact of Nineteenth-Century Juvenile Literature

That imperialism which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and spirits…. Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?” —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Wherever English is spoken one imagines that Mr. Henty‘s name is known. One cannot enter a schoolroom or look at a boy’s bookshelf without seeing half-a-dozen of his familiar volumes. Now that Kingston is gone and Captain Marryat is never read—and more’s the pity—Mr. Henty is no doubt the last successful writer for boys, and the one to whose new volumes they look forward every Christmas with most pleasure. Broadly, there are two classes of writers for boys: those who write a story with no intent to amuse, and those who write a story in which the plot is subservient to the moral. To neither ofthese classes does Mr. Henty belong. If his stories have any moral at all beyond the teaching of self-reliance, honesty and uprightness we have not been able to discover it. He is satisfied with writing an exciting story, which he usually pitches in some period or country which will enable him to impart a 165

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little historical knowledge in a way that will not offend his readers—and boys are the most unforgiving of critics. —(quoted from an 1892 book review [cited in Arnold, Held Fast for England])1

Henty’s novels are a fascinating deposit of some of the brightest of our “Imperial” sentiment. Every book contains passages of moral stricture and advice which are often embarrassing to read today, but which once helped to mold the personalities of tens of thousands of English schoolboys whose eventual task it was to administer and defend our Empire. —William Allan, “G.A.Henty”

The fiction of empire and Henty’s works in particular have impacted significantly on twentieth-century race relations. Because Henty used popular colonial wars for the setting and plot of his novels, it is important to undermine Henty’s glorification of these wars, and also to highlight the ways in which similar narratives wrongly romanticized the history of the colonized. And ironically, despite the commitment on the part of pioneer pan-Africanists to rehabilitate the damaged image, identity, and culture of the colonized, these pioneers, as a result of their colonial education, often demonstrated some ambivalence toward their own culture and people. They seemed to view themselves through the eyes of the colonizer, as they struggled to break the chains of psychological oppression. It is difficult to quantify the impact of colonialism on Africa. Politically, colonial rule undermined traditional authority and its system of justice; economically, Africans were coerced to produce export or cash crops for European markets and to pay taxes to the colonial power, while their raw materials were exploited. The production of cash crops at the expense of food crops became the main source of famine in the early stages of colonial occupation and through the years of decolonization and beyond. Socially, colonialism provided increased mobility between regions and created new cities and towns, modern hospitals, and schools. But access to these opportunities was limited to a “select few,” who became the “elite that was more European than African in outlook”. Although the railroads that were built

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(through forced labor) took many African lives, they were primarily a commercial venture designed to facilitate the shipment of mineral resources and raw materials to Europe (Azevedo 112–13). Culturally, the advent of Christianity upset traditional religious beliefs by condemning the African way of life in general; it also denigrated concepts such as the extended families which had previously been a source of support, and a “protection against age, adverse social changes and natural calamities.” As Mario Azevedo observes, although Christianity trained “many Africans in its schools, some of whom became the leaders of the new nationalist movements,” it also caused “severe psychological and social dislocations” (114). The colonial encounter, according to Fanon, causes “the black man…to experience his being through others,” that is, through Europeans. As he argues in Black Skin, White Masks, A Malagasy is a Malagasy; or rather, no, not he is a Malagasy but, rather, in an absolute sense he “lives” his Malagasyhood. If he is Malagasy, it is because the white man has come, and if at a certain stage he has been led to ask himself whether he is indeed a man, it is because his reality as a man has been challenged. In other words, I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me I am a parasite on the world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world, …then I will quite simply try to make myself white: that is, I will compel the white man to acknowledge that I am human. (98)

Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were instrumental in perpetuating the myth of Black inferiority in the mid-twentieth century even as African countries strove to regain their sovereignty from colonial rule. French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni was among the first in this domain; in his Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization he argued that the Malagasy suffers from a “dependency complex” as a result of what he calls the “cult of the dead” (Mama 331–32). In other words, the advent of colonial rule in Madagascar is to be viewed as the materialization of the Malagasy’s dream of the expected messiah (Mannoni 49–52). Assuming that “their [Europeans’] coming was unconsciously expected—even desired—by the future subject peoples,” as Mannoni claims, why, then, did the French use torture in Madagascar, Algeria, and elsewhere to make the people bow to colonial rule? Mannoni, failing to see that the alleged condition of the native is a product of the

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colonial encounter, concluded that the germ of the “dependency complex” was latent in the Malagasy or native since childhood. Paradoxically, Mannoni acknowledged that the “colonial relationship… cannot be psychologically healthy for Europeans….” (Mama 32). Hence, by dehumanizing or objectifying the native the colonizer dehumanizes or objectifies himself: the “master” complex is an explicit element in colonial history. African resistance to colonial rule brought about many wars throughout the continent. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth gives us a psychiatrist’s insight into the Franco-Algerian war of independence as Fanon describes the case of a police inspector who had been torturing his wife and children. The inspector told the psychiatrist: “Even outside my job, I feel I want to settle the fellows who get in my way, even for nothing at all. Look here, for example, suppose I go to the kiosk to buy the papers. There’s a lot of people. Of course you have to wait. I hold out my hand (the chap who keeps the kiosk is a pal of mine) to take my papers. Someone in the line gives me a challenging look and says ‘Wait for your turn.’ Well, I feel I want to beat him up and I say to myself, ‘If I had you for a few hours my fine fellow you wouldn’t look so clever afterwards….’ The thing that kills me most is the torture. You don’t know what that is, do you? Sometimes I torture people for ten hours at a stretch.” (266–67).

But what he asked the doctor was “to help him to go on torturing Algerian patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behavior problems, and with complete equanimity” (269–70). Contrary to Mannoni’s claims, this police inspector did not seem to be working among natives who desired or expected his presence in Algeria. The officer became obsessed with his power to torture and dominate to the extent that he tortured his wife and children for pleasure. As he put it, he was “the master in this house” (268). For Kurtz to ornament the entrance of his home in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with human heads is an illustration of how greed and power, endemic to the colonial enterprise, could affect the colonizer. While the above-mentioned police inspector tortured the Algerians to extort information from them, Kurtz tortured for ivory. Likewise, in Ngugi’s novel Weep Not, Child Mr. Rowlands is a British settler-farmer who had fled European civilization and politics when his son was killed in World War II. Ironically, he finds himself in the middle of the so-called Mau Mau upris-

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ings in Kenya and becomes a monster in defending what he considers to be his God: But his son had been taken away…. It was no good calling on the name of God for he, Howlands, did not believe in God. There was only one god for him—and that was the farm he had created, the land he had tamed. And who were these Mau Mau who were now claiming that land, his god?…. He had been called upon to take up a temporary appointment as a District Officer. He had agreed. But only because this meant defending his god. (76–77)

Howlands decides to fight the Kenyans whose land he and other settlers had illegally occupied. He becomes fascinated by his divide-andrule tactics: “Mr. Howlands felt a certain gratifying pleasure. The machine he had set in motion was working. The blacks were destroying the blacks. They would destroy themselves to the end…. Let them destroy themselves…. The few who remained would be satisfied with the land the white man had preserved for them. Yes, Mr. Howlands was coming to enjoy his work” (97). Just as the condition of the native was a result of the colonial encounter, so was that of the colonizer. To celebrate colonialism or empire is to celebrate torture and murder; to celebrate the writers of empire is to value materialism and national pride over human life. Such writers made it their objective to praise, legitimize, and encourage the inhumane treatment of a people whose only “crime” was the fact that they did not have weapons of destruction. Yet, these were the ideas paraded in books for young adults and in public schools where the future administrators of empire were trained. John Hobson laments in his Imperialism: A Study: Most serious of all is the persistent attempt to seize the school system for imperialism masquerading as patriotism. To capture the childhood of the country, to mechanize its free play into the routine of military drill, to cultivate the savage survivals of combativeness, to poison its early understanding by false ideals and pseudo-heroes, and by a consequent disparagement and neglect of the really vital and elevating lessons of the past, to establish a “geocentric” view of the moral universe in which the interests of humanity are subordinated to that of the “country” (and so, by easy, early, natural inference, that of the “country” to that of the “self”), to feed the overweening pride of race at an age when self-confidence most commonly prevails, and by necessary implication to disparage other nations, so starting children in the world with false measures of value and an unwillingness to learn from foreign sources—to fasten this base insularity of mind and morals upon the lit-

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tle children of a nation and to call it patriotism is as foul an abuse of education as it is possible to conceive. (229–30)

John Hobson captures the spirit and tone of antiracist education, in that he noticed the psychological damage done by school systems when they manipulate the perceptions of the young. Arguably, the role played by the writers of empire is more far-reaching than that played by the school system in propagating imperialist views, because while the nineteenth-century public school molded the empire boys, the juvenile adventure story catered to all classes and sometimes to adult audiences. Notwithstanding the fact that we cannot attribute racial tensions of the twentieth century solely to Henty and other writers of empire, it would be equally unrealistic to overlook the legacy and impact of the Hentys on twentieth-century attitudes toward race. While racism did not begin with the works of Henty and his contemporaries, these people nevertheless helped perpetuate it. Because race was the cornerstone of the works of these writers, it is imperative for any critical work on them to make race its central focus.2 It is often said that children are the future; what kind of world did Henty envisage for his juvenile readers? Did he serve his generation as a moralist of sorts? Henty’s popularity, especially among his readers and contemporaries, attests to his influence and impact. Although he condemned the use of alcohol and encouraged teamwork and perseverance, almost all his young heroes smoked. In fact Henty, who smoked all his life, believed that smoking was not harmful provided one began after the age of twenty-one. Henty also thought that “a glass of spirits and water may do no harm, but there is such a tendency upon the part of those who use them to increase the dose, and the end is, in that case, destruction to mind and body” (quoted in Arnold 26). Whether or not Henty promoted good behavior among the young in those terms, there are more damaging messages in his works (discussed throughout this book) that go almost unnoticed by critics, probably because they are on Henty’s side of the equation. What has Henty left as legacy and impact when he states repeatedly that the nonBritish are by definition inferior? He was not a Dickens, a Tennyson, a Gaskell, an Eliot, or an Austen, one could argue. Why revive him when currently efforts are made to improve race relations? Unfortunately, many people forget that what Henty stood for and helped perpetuate is still in full force. Henty has influenced not only the young

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for whom he wrote, but writers of the canon as well. Geoffrey Trease, a faithful Henty admirer, points out: How many boys read Henty now? Precious few, I should imagine. Yet the memory, if not immortal, deserves honour, even when the fiftieth anniversary [of Henty’s death] has become a centenary…. Modern and future schoolboys may not need him, but his influence will survive as long as my own generation—and perhaps, indirectly, a good deal longer. For who of us, who write the historical adventure-stories today, can deny our debt to him?” (quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green 83–84).

In The Collector’s Book of Boys’ Stories, Eric Quay le argues that “the debt the late-Victorian and Edwardian educationists owed to G.A. Henty as a popular historian was often acknowledged in later years, when the boys who devoured his historical tales had grown to manhood” (56) and, “this seems also to have been the case in the United States as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand” (Arnold 19). The formation of the Henty Society in 1977 is another proof of his enduring influence. The society is one of the ways in which the British attempt to cling to the old glory of empire. In her 1986 study of adventure literature, Margery Fisher defends Henty at length and states that “what critics do not mention is Henty’s attention to his minor characters. His heroes are, by choice and appropriately, representative, but the people they are involved with are by no means stereotypes” (353). Does Fisher look past the African characters without seeing them? Or does she not recognize a stereotype? Even on their own African terrain, the African people are apparently invisible to this children’s book critic. According to Fisher, “every writer expresses his attitudes— moral, political, emotional—in his books,” and “since attitudes change from one period to another, an over-emphatic note of propaganda in books written in the past causes them to be neglected or censored later” (349). Henty’s reputation, she writes, “has suffered from a change of attitude” (349). But Fisher’s own pro-Henty discussion suggests that the procolonial attitude has not changed. Fisher goes on to argue that those who accused Henty of “racial arrogance” toward “The Third World” (Guy Arnold in this case) focused on the “content of the stories” with “examples taken out of context (if indeed examples were quoted at all)” (352). One may ask whether Fisher disapproves of readers and critics focusing on the content of the stories, or within what context she herself reads Henty’s stories. Does the quality of a work of fiction depend solely on style? Fisher maintains that “if he [Henty]

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does not arouse anti-war sentiments, he does not glorify war either in the way that some of his successors were apt to do” (352). How, then, does Fisher justify Henty’s message to the youth in the preface to his St. George for England? Henty writes: “You may be told perhaps that there is no good to be obtained from tales of fighting and bloodshed— that there is no moral to be drawn from such histories. Believe it not. War has its lessons as well as Peace” (3). The glorification of war could hardly be presented more explicitly. Another myopic reading of Henty comes from Suzanne Rahn. In her 1991 article “An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for Children” Rahn has the following to say about Henty and his work: As a veteran war correspondent, he knows too much about war to glorify it, and has less to say about British supremacy than about cultural and religious tolerance and the usefulness of foreign language. What made his work “imperialist”3 may have been the cumulative effect of those seventy-odd volumes…. Mastering Henty does give one a heady sense of mastering the world. (8)

How could Rahn defend Henty when the author himself had stated that his books had helped “foster the imperialist spirit”? What does Rahn have to say about Henty’s comments that “the intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old,” and that those who “go beyond this are exceptions….”? (Henty, By Sheer Pluck 117–118). Perhaps she would applaud Henty’s observation that “when women leave their proper sphere and put themselves forward to do men’s work, they must expect men’s treatment; and the foolish women at home who clamour for women’s rights, that is to say, for equality of work, would, if they had their way, inflict enormous damage on their sex” (By Sheer Pluck 268). This is the writer Fisher and Rahn defend even when there are numerous examples of racism and sexism throughout his work. The battlefield was an exclusively male sphere in the Victorian age, and this left women characters on the periphery in Henty’s novels—characters whose primary use was in plot arrangements, as in With Kitchener in the Soudan. A look at Henty’s African novels not only sheds light upon the overall perception on women in Henty’s time, but also makes one wonder why critics such as Fisher and Rahn have chosen to defend Henty. Margaret Strobel argues in the introduction to European Women and the Second British Empire that although European women were

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“agents of European ethnocentrism,” they were also “treated as inferiors—the inferior sex within the superior race” (vi). Henty’s representation of women, whenever they are mentioned (and that is rare), is condescending, to say the least. His works rarely make mention of indigenous and European women. In writing for boys as empire-builders, Henty indicates his belief that the creation of the British empire is a “man’s work.” This position is in line with the aspersions of female characters in goverment circles. In 1870 Queen Victorian herself opposed “this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’,” because she feared that a “woman would become the most hateful, heartless—and disgusting—of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself (quoted in Miles 183). An English earl, as late as 1907, prevented a bill that would allow women limited voting rights from passing. He explained: “‘I think they are too hysterical, they are too much disposed to be guided by feeling and not by cold reason, and to refuse any kind of compromise. I do not think women are safe guides in government, they are very unsafe guides.’“ This view was endorsed by another leading figure of the aristocracy in these terms: ‘“What is to be feared is that if we take away the position which woman has hitherto occupied, which has come to them from no artificial education but from nature, if we transfer her from domestic into political life… the homes and happiness of every member of the community will be worsened by the transference” (quoted in Miles 187–88). In Henty’s novels, it is as though his heroes’ character has nothing to do with the education the heroes receive from their parents (mothers). In By Sheer Pluck, the hero, Frank, on seeing the so-called Amazons (female soldiers) of Dahomey (present-day Republic of Benin), thinks it is “dreadful to fire at women.” Using Mr. Goodenough as his mouthpiece, Henty lectures Frank: “That is merely an idea of civilization, Frank. In countries where women are dependent upon men, leaving to them the work of providing for the family and home, while they employ themselves in domestic duties and in brightening the lives of the men, they are treated with respect. But as their work becomes rougher, so does the position which they occupy in men’s esteem fall. Among the middle and upper classes throughout Europe a man is considered a brute and a coward who lifts his hand against a woman. Among the lower classes wife and woman beating is by no means uncommon, nor is such an assault regarded with much more reprobation than an attack upon a man. When women leave their proper sphere and put themselves forward to do men’s work, they must expect men’s treatment; and the foolish women at home who

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clamour for women’s rights, that is to say, for an equality of work, would, if they had their way, inflict enormous damage on their sex.” (268)

Here, Henty’s view regarding women’s rights is evident. He also has an interesting definition of women’s rights (“equality of work”), and warns British women who, if accorded equal rights, would end up like the Amazons, fighting wars—something that is antithetical with Victorian (that is civilized) people. Female soldiers, like the Amazons, must have been an anomaly found among savages. One wonders what Henty would say about the gender composition of the British military in 1999. He might say that the British race has gone native. In With Buller in Natal, “women had more than once been seen in the firing ranks of the Boers, and there were reports that Amazon corps were in the course of formation in the Transvaal” (Henty 361). The thought of female soldiers must have been alarming to Henty since the Boers (who are also White like the British, but in Henty’s world, inferior to them) are following in the footsteps of barbarians (the people of Dahomey). In With Roberts to Pretoria, Yorke Harberton, although very “fond of his sisters, regarded them as mere girls, and especially objected to being in any way, as he considered, patronized by them” (Henty 16). Mr. Harberton, after losing his income, entertains hopes that his daughters, because they are “unsafe guides” and therefore must be taken care of, “will be married and provided for” (Henty 20). Henty evidently applauds the relationship between Mrs. Allnutt and her husband (Yorke’s cousin), because “out-of-doors, the farm was managed entirely by the husband, but inside the house [her “natural” sphere in the Victorian mind] she was absolute mistress” (Henty 37). In The Young Colonists, Dick Humphreys reprimands his friend Tom for his cowardice, which he equates with feminine attributes: “I will hit you in the eye, Tom Jackson, if you don’t shut up; you are as bad as a girl; I am ashamed of you” (Henty 7). The English earl (quoted earlier), who believed that women “are too much disposed to be guided by feeling and not by cold reason,” seems to reflect Henty’s ideas in The Dash for Khartoum. For example, when Edgar Clinton runs away from school, his brother Rupert is concerned about what he could “do when he got there [London],” while his sister Madge says: “Oh, I am not thinking about that!…. I am thinking what he must feel when he knows father and mother are not his father and mother, and that you and I are not his brother and sister” (Henty 63).

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Only in With Kitchener in the Soudan does Henty portray a strongwilled woman, Annie Hartley, who, working as a tutor, raises her only son Gregory, after her husband dies in battle. But because she is of a lower class, a governess, her husband is disinherited. To discuss Henty’s representation of women amounts to looking for a needle in a haystack since he frequently excludes them from the narrative, and when they are mentioned, it is in relation to the hero. The fact that colonization caused physical and psychological damage to the colonized people goes unheeded, but the continuing impact is what the enlightened critics of the twentieth century should attempt to understand and dismantle. We no longer talk about the savages or even underdeveloped peoples, but rather the Third World or developing countries. The fact is that the images these terms conjure in our minds are the same: less than, inferior to Europe or Anglo-America. Henty became an institution even before his death. The “Navy and Army Illustrated” of December 16, 1899 wrote this review of Henty’s books: Mr. Henty is certainly an astonishing man. For more years than I care to remember he has been pouring forth stories of adventure which have won him world-wide repute, and there is no falling off either in the quality or the freshness of the five volumes—if there are not more—which appear from his pen this Christmas. There is something of the prig in his heroes, perhaps, and behind his glowing pages the schoolmaster lies hid; but he is such a skillful contriver that these points are rarely discerned by this readers. He surveys the world from China to Peru. (Quoted in Arnold 24)

Henty’s “points are rarely discerned by his readers” because “behind his glowing pages” there is always more than the schoolmaster. Of course Henty’s stories have more to them than the teaching of selfreliance, uprightness, and selective honesty (since the Boy Scouts model he used in his works relies on double-dealing, disguise, and other deceitful tactics to extort information). The so-called historical knowledge Henty imparted through his stories did nothing but offend and denigrate those whose history he supposedly wrote. As Peter Murrell has argued in his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation “The Imperial Idea and Children’s Literature, 1840–1902” history and the history teacher were crucial to British imperialism, and the “question of bias in school histories was one which concerned many commentators.” In the School Board Chronicle John Hopkins stressed the bias in the writ-

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ing of history for the young, and warned against it: “If we put before the children a panorama of the past we may safely leave them to draw their own conclusions, and we shall thus avoid the risk of impressing one-sided opinions upon their minds” (quoted in Murrell 33). To discuss the role of history and the teacher of history vis-à-vis British imperialist enterprise is not to suggest that Henty was a reliable teacher of history or a historian. But the fact that he was considered as such sheds light on his extensive impact on the young. As early as 1858, J.Birchall asserted that history for children should focus on “wars, generals, admirals, the growth of British power and the conquest of India.” He believed it was “‘deplorable to see the history of England frittered to a list of petty inventions and puny discoveries’“ (quoted in Murrell 37). The patriotic history teacher, therefore, “‘will, from the pages before him, throw a wild enchantment over his class; he will draw forth the patriotic spirit; he will sway the feelings of all, carrying them, even against their own inclination, whithersoever he wishes’“ (quoted in Murrell 41). Henty, definitely, was this type of “history” teacher—a propagandist. Biased history along with patriotism was what he promoted in schoolbooks for the young. In fact, according to Murrell, patriotism was considered to be “a worthy aim of history.” Thus, the schoolteacher was “called upon to fullfil a patriotic function” in the teaching of history: “‘It may be said without exaggeration that with them [history teachers] more than with any other body of men lies the future of the Empire. Every year millions of children are passing through our schools, soon to have a voice in ordering the Imperial polity. As they have been taught, so will they act’“ (quoted in Murrell 40–41). The writers for whom Henty served as a model are particularly uncomfortable with what has become known as postcolonial writing and theory: a critique of colonialist discourse of the Other4—a necessary activity, because as Fanon puts it, “colonization must be brought to trial” (211). It is not enough that the “colonial Briton in Africa became conscious that Empire, racial superiority, even mission and purpose were ebbing,” because although the “dear old flag stood for no abiding authority” its legacy could not disappear so easily (Lewis and Foy 201). We could argue, as Hobson does, that the education theorists, historians, and novelists have created a “moral universe in which the interests of humanity are subordinated to that of ‘country’“ (Hobson 229) Their main preoccupation was to use the “school system for imperialism masquerading as patriotism” (Hobson 229–30). A let-

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ter written to Henty by one of his “lads” in Canada attests to the biased history, the cultivation of “savage survivals of combativeness,” and the mechanization of the child’s “free play into the routine of military drill” that Hobson talked about (Hobson 230). The boy, obviously a Henty admirer, wrote an “original story of stories” to the author, using the titles of Henty’s books: G.A.Henty, Esq. Dear Sir, Hoping you will excuse me for troubling you, but I would like you to read the little story I have made (while staying home from school with the measles). I have read and enjoyed a great many of your books. Following is a story made out of names of some of the books you have written: “Jack Archer,” while traveling “Through Russian Snows,” met “Captain Bayley’s Heir,” who had been “Through the Sikh War” as “One of the 28th” and was “True to the Old Flag,” was swimming “In Greek Waters,” being pursued by “The Tiger of Mysore,” which had come ‘Through the Fray” “By Sheer Pluck.” All of a sudden along came a man who was “The Bravest of the Brave” while “With Wolfe in Canada” and “With Clive in India”; he also showed valour “At Agincourt,” which was “Won by the Sword” “By England’s Aid,” headed by “A Knight of the White Cross” who was with “Wulf the Saxon” and “Beric the Briton” in fighting “The Dragon and the Raven,” which were “For the Temple” met “The Cat of Bubastes,” followed by “The Young Carthaginian” who was “Condemned as a Nihilist” for killing “The Lion of the North” and “The Lion of St. Mark” which were owned by “The Young Colonists” and “Maori and Settler” who said they were “With Buller in Natal,” and had come to arrest him as “A Jacobite Exile,” with their colours “Orange and Green,” in the name of “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” It happened when on “St. Bartholomew’s Eve” along came “St. George for England” “By Right of Conquest.” “In Freedom’s Cause” he was “Held Fast for England” “In the Reign of Terror.” “Under Drake’s Flag” he made “The Dash for Khartoum,” which “With Lee in Virginia” “For Name and Fame” he fought and won “By Pike and Dyke,” assisted by “Redskin and Cowboy.” All this happened “When London Burned.” Trusting you will let me know if you receive this, and how you like the story, Yours very truly…(Quoted in Fenn 329–30).

The boy’s ability to piece together a story à la Henty is impressive. More importantly, his story reveals Henty’s impact on the youth, in that it replicates the aggressive, and combative tone characteristic of Henty’s stories. One could argue that this youth has conceptualized the imperial themes Henty dealt with during the course of his career as a boys’ writer. He is the type of youth that Henty tried and succeeded

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in molding. As Mr. R.van Eeghen wrote in a 1908 issue of The Captain: There is no doubt that the immortal Henty and his hosts of imitators have made the British nation the most conceited people on this earth. It is the plotless trash of authors who shelter themselves behind the section in the library catalogue entitled “Books for Boys”, which have given the average Englishman that very excellent opinion of himself which he now enjoys. Putting aside the question of the utter impossibilities of the usual boys’ book, it is quite easy to see the harm the authors of these volumes cause by the exaggeration of the deeds and opinions of their invraisemblables heroes. After fourteen or fifteen years perusal of “piffle” written apparently for his edification, the young Englishman leaves home and country with the very firm idea in his head that he, personally, is equal to two or more Frenchmen, about four Germans, an indefinite number of Russians, and any quantity you care to mention of the remaining scum of the earth. (Quoted in Arnold 22)

Although Henty wrote primarily for the British youth or empirebuilders-to-be, the youth in the colonies also read his works. Hence to say, as a reviewer mentioned, that Henty imparted “a little historical knowledge in a way that will not offend his readers” is a dubious conclusion. As van Eeghen had pointed out, the “immortal Henty and his host of imitators have made the British nation the most conceited people on this earth,” because their works contained an “exaggeration of the deeds and opinions of their invraisemblables heroes” (Arnold 22) and the sense of a superiority complex that the world has yet to expose. The French, who wanted to make Black French citizens out of Africans, began to teach in their colonial schools that “Nos ancêtres sont les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors are the Gauls”). This, of course, is nothing short of brainwashing. One might ask how the French became ancestors to Africans? It is not unusual for a young reader to identify with the hero of a story, but when the hero is always a member of the same racial group (Europeans) and the antagonists are always Africans or non-Europeans, then the child and young adult may begin to conceptualize, unconsciously or not, about both the perpetual hero and his enemies. While the English youth may delight in reading of the exploits of Britain and feel a sense of superiority, the Black or African youth is likely to develop an inferiority complex which may lead to self-contempt or low self-esteem. Exposed to this kind of literature, the colonized may develop, in Fanon’s terms, a “nervous condition” (The Wretched of the Earth, 20) as exemplified in a number of African

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novels, including Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988). In Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born a character by the name of Stella refuses to drink beer brewed in Ghana because “it does not agree with [her] constitution” (131). Chinua Achebe relates a story about a student who wrote an essay about winter while he meant the harmattan,5 and when asked why he did so, the boy replied that other boys would call him a “bushman” if he wrote about the harmattan (44). Would one normally be ashamed of the climate or weather of one’s country, a natural phenomenon? Another example of the impact of juvenile colonial fiction comes from an African-American/Caribbean movie star, Sidney Poitier. In his autobiography This Life Poitier recalls the impact of adventure stories about Africa on his life. He grew up believing Africa was synonymous with snakes, and when he arrived in Nairobi (Kenya) years later as an adult, he was unable to sleep because he kept looking for snakes everywhere in his modern hotel room. He wonders: Where did that come from? Was it too obvious to assume that it arose from the whole mythology of Africa found in Western literature, that characterized it as wild, primitive, infested with dangerous animals, and crawling with poisonous snakes that slip into your bed at night, and all that kind of shit? Yes, too obvious—and it lets off the hook all those dumb-ass Tarzan movies, and the white hunter Bwana movies, in which lions, elephants and alligators are always chasing the hapless African gun bearer up a baobab tree, and the most sinister purveyors of African culture, the Jungle Jim-type comic strips that represented the initial exposure of many black American children to “what it must be like in Africa.” (184)

Poitier’s experience is a perfect example of how juvenile literature can control our perception of the world and the people around us. Poitier’s experience is not exclusive to children; adults seem to be taken in, as well, by adventure novels. Although at this point in his life Poitier had begun to question the veracity of the material he had absorbed as a child, he was unable to dismiss the “African jungle” image and went to sleep “that first night with the lights on and one eye open for snakes” (184). If we would evaluate the impact of juvenile literature on our adult lives, the choice of reading material for children and young adults should be less readily taken for granted.6 The damage done by this representation of Africa and its denizens is more than we

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would like to admit. The child who associates Africa with negative images will find it difficult to look beyond those stereotypes even as an adult. The adult Poitier knew the Tarzan movies were exaggerations, but he kept looking for snakes under his bed in Nairobi and was unable to sleep. Many African and diasporan nationalists subscribed somewhat to the manichean language, if not the ideology, of Europe. It is true that Pan-Africanism7 of the early 1900s, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the Negritude movement of the 1940s did increase the momentum of Black self-assertion, de-colonization and deprogramming. And although the initial Pan-African movement was—in the words of Basil Davidson—a “Pan-Negro” movement, it later expanded to incorporate the peoples of Africa and African descent. But the forerunners of these ideas were surprisingly biased toward their own people whom they intended to lead to the Promised Land. Marcus Garvey, whose Pan-African ideas and endeavors are legendary, focused on establishing universities, colleges, and secondary schools in Africa and the diaspora and developing worldwide commercial and industrial enterprises; but he also insisted on “civilizing the backward tribes of Africa” (Lewis, Marcus Garvey 50). Another renowned Pan-Africanist who renounced his American citizenship and moved to Ghana, W.E.B. DuBois, talked about poor Black people in the South of the United States in these terms: “They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner” (xxxv). The celebrated poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay, wrote a dialect poem called “Africa”: Seems our lan’ must ha’ been a bery low-do’n place, Mek it tek such long time in tu’ning out a race’… But I t’ink it do good, tek we from Africa And lan’ us in a blessed place as dis ya. Talk ‘bouten Africa, we would be deh till now’ Maybe same half-naked—all day dribe buccra cow, An’ tearin’ t’rough de bush wid all de monkey dem, Wile an’ uncibilise’, an’ neber comin’ tame.

In his book The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness

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(1911), the Ghanaian Attoh Ahuma appealed to Africans to be proud of their culture and history, but he added: “Let us help each other to find a way out of Darkest Africa…. We must emerge from the savage backwoods, and come into the open where nations are made” (quoted in Davidson, Modern Africa, 34–35). In the 1920s, the Algerian patriot Sheikh Ben Badis thought that Algeria was “weak and insufficiently evolved” and needed “to come within the protecting wing of a strong and civilized nation,” France (Davidson, Modern Africa, 41). The above examples are not intended to downplay the crucial role of these Pan-Africanists in the liberation struggle, since their objective was clearly to achieve emancipation from colonial domination. But these examples show how they have been nonetheless influenced by a European perception of the world. In other words, what is civilized or barbaric is defined from certain cultural perspectives. Indeed while one might think that living in a hut is a savage existence, another might think that so-called drive-by shootings among skyscrapers provide an equally savage way of life. Whatever ambivalence or conditioning there was in these Pan-Africanists’ thought, they nevertheless opened the door for change in the future. While we may want to think that the colonial encounter affected only the colonized, without question the colonizer was also dehumanized in the process: it made the colonizer more conceited, and forced the colonized to ask, in Fanon’s terms, “in reality, who am I?” (The Wretched of the Earth, 250) The examples cited obviously show the ways in which juvenile literature affects our perception of ourselves and others. But what happens to children who read this type of literature? The heroes we encounter in these works are typical heroes of empire: against all odds and orphaned at fourteen, they make it to the top, which by itself would be very inspirational, but they are always heroes who find themselves among “hostile natives” and “savages.” These heroes are portrayed as role models endowed with virtues with which the young reader can easily identify. The content of a highly popular novel might well be internalized by young readers no matter how foolish or improbable it may be. What is happening today in terms of prejudice and racial animosity can be partly attributed to what we can dare to call childabusive literature. Western mainstream writers of the twentieth century have reached for symbols to convey meaning to young audiences, and have drawn from a reservoir of cultural presuppositions not far removed from the pool of myths in Henty’s time. The result has been the use of fre-

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quently repeated characterizations (Blacks as indolent, servile, irresponsible, clownish; Caucasians as Great White Saviors and models of initiative and industry). The European imagination conjured these illusions, and Henty made them available in his group portraits. By way of explanation, Chinua Achebe’s comments are instructive. He analyzes the racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and sees Africa used as a foil by the European mind, “as a place of negations…in comparison with Europe’s own state of spiritual grace” (3). He writes: “the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa” (17). This interpretation is equally applicable to children’s books. And all the affirmative-action programs and efforts to deal with prejudice and equal opportunity are labor lost when cultural bias has already been established in the child at a time when he or she cannot judge the accuracy of white supremacist materials. It is not by accident that although culture changes continually, the image of Blacks did not essentially change until Black writers began to be admitted to the children’s book field in the 1960s. Slavery and colonization have changed the face of the world on several levels: physically, economically, socially, politically, and culturally. Africans and their descendants remain deeply scarred by the slavery and colonization that neither abolitionism nor decolonization could cure. The psychological wounds that slavery and colonization left in their wake will continue to plague society as long as the texts that legitimize human suffering in the name of civilization are still promoted as good art—as long as they are taught in institutions of learning without adequate socio-political insight or historical context. What I have tried to show in the course of this book is the relation of twentieth-century prejudice to nineteenth-century British empire-building, which can be traced back to the rise of capitalism, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and colonization—activities directed toward the African continent or at the expense of Africa. More specifically, I have focused on the texts that followed the British flag into the “heart of darkness”— texts that justified the encroaching of the British on the rights and dignity of the African people. When I told a friend I was critiquing nineteenth-century juvenile literature, he could not believe that I was fascinated by a genre that did not seem to him important or to contain anything worthy of criticism. I believe this friend is not alone in underestimating the role juvenile literature plays in our lives, our worldview. Our ability to readily equate difference with pathology may be the

CONCLUSION 183

result of our exposure at an early age to reading materials for the young. Deconstructing imperial fiction may not readily translate into achieving racial tolerance, but it is an attempt to place stereotypes (the underlying basis for prejudice) in their historical perspectives and to present the other side of the story. What is the future project of postcolonial writing and theory? Where do we go from here? Are we Africans “invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation,” as Wole Soyinka puts it (Myth, Literature and the African World, x) by providing the raw materials (subject matter) for European industries (literary theory factories) where postcolonialism becomes only a commodity in the world of the intellect? NOTES 1. This review appeared in Review of Reviews after the publication of Henty’s Condemned As a Nihilist in 1892. 2. As Cornel West argues in the introduction to his Race Matters, race matters. After an hour spent on the corner of Sixtieth Street and Park Avenue in New York City waiting to catch a taxi, and after the tenth taxi passed him by and “stopped for a kind, welldressed, smiling female fellow citizen of European descent,” West wonders “what race matters have meant to the American past and...how much race matters in the American present (x-xi). 3. Suzanne Rahn is using Margery Fisher’s term imperialist and obviously distancing herself from the term by putting it in quotation marks, since she does not see any imperialist attitudes in Henty’s works! Margery Fisher has argued that Henty’s “imperialist views were no more exaggeratedly expressed than those of Ballantyne”; see Fisher 351. 4. In the November 6, 1995, issue of the New Yorker, David Denby, referring to Chinua Achebe’s and Edward Said’s critique of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, argues in his article “Jungle Fever” that “what Achebe and Said (and a fair number of other politicized critics) are offering is not simply a different interpretation of this or that work but something close to an attack on the moral legitimacy of literature” (128). However, he admits that “the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumptions in language and point of view” (129). But Denby’s labeling of those who unearth racist assumptions in the works of these writers of empire as academic left or politicized critics has many hidden

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assumptions of its own. According to Denby, Heart of Darkness “could indeed be read as racist by someone sufficiently angry to ignore its fictional strategies, its palpable anguish, and the many differences between Conrad’s eighteen-nineties consciousness of race and our own” (129). One may ask if Conrad’s condemnation of colonialism and his “fictional strategies” leave the reader with the impression that, as Said argues, “imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination?” (Said 30). What Denby struggles with in his article is best summarized by Gloria Woodard and Donnarae MacCann in their article “Huckleberry Finn and the Traditions of Blackface Minstrelsy.” They argue that “[I]t is unfortunate that in extolling a work of literature, most critics feel they must endorse it in its entirety and, in effect, support its biases” (MacCann and Woodard 100). 5. The harmattan is a seasonal dry and cool north-southerly wind (between November and February) on the west coast of Africa. 6. An African-American friend once told me that in the 1950s it was an insult to call someone an African, because the latter meant (maybe still means) barbarian, uncivilized, primitive—to say the least. As a citizen of Togo (West Africa), I felt insulted, but I later realized that her perception came from many sources including juvenile literature. My European-American roommates also thought of me as a very lucky person since, as an African, I supposedly did not have to go to the zoo to see wild animals, implying that the latter roamed in my backyard, as recently exemplified in Eddie Murphy’s movie Coming to America. I must be a very unfortunate African because I have never seen any animals in my backyard—even in the village—until I came to the United States where deer and the like roam freely without the hunters’ gaze. I now understand the paradox: since many Africans cannot afford the “luxury” of chemically fattened frozen chicken and beef from the supermarket or that of preserving wild life, they have to depend on wild game for their livelihood, but the association of Africa with wild animals embedded in people’s consciousness ignores this simple reality. 7. The term Pan-Africanism was coined by Henry Sylvester Williams, a West Indian. This is not to say that he was the first Pan-Africanist per se, because the yearning to link peoples of African descent is as old as the Triangular Trade. In 1897, when he was studying law in England, Williams founded the Pan-

CONCLUSION 185

African Association, whose aim was to lobby on behalf of Africa at the time when European countries were fighting over their piece of the “continental cake.” In 1900 he organized the first PanAfrican Conference, which brought delegates to London from the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Africa. The issues discussed at this embryonic stage of the association centered on ways to “unite the African world into one solid body” that would fight for the liberation of the continent (Martin 11–12).

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Edgerton, Robert. The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa’s Gold Coast New York: Free Press, 1995. Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. New York: Pantheon, 1975. Ellis, Peter Berresford. H.Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Elmen, Paul. William Golding: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967. Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. Hong Kong: Longman Group, 1988. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967. ——. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963. Fast, Howard. Lord Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts. New York: J. Messner, 1941. Fenn, George Manville. George Alfred Henty: The Story of an Active Life. London: Blackie & Sons, 1911. Fisher, Margery. The Bright Face of Danger. London and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Gaines, Ernest Jr. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Dial, 1971. Gates, Henry Louis, ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. Green, Martin Burgess. The Adventurous Male: Chapters in the History of the White Male Mind. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993. ——. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic, 1979. ——. The Robinson Crusoe Story. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990. Green, Roger Lancelyn. Tellers of Tales: British Authors of Children’s Books from 1800 to 1964. New York: Franklin Watts, 1965. Gregory, Steven, and Roger Sanjek, eds. Race. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994. Gurko, Leo. Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile. New York: Collier, 1979.

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Haggard, Henry Rider. Allan Quatermain. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1922. ——. The Days of My Life: An Autobiography. London & New York, Longmans, Green, 1926. ——. King Solomon’s Mines. New York: Lancer, 1968. Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History. New York: New American Library, 1987. Harris, Sheldon. Paul Cuffe: Black America and the African Return. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Hartman, Geoffrey. Beyond Formalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Henkin, Leo Justin. Darwinism in the English Novel, 1860–1910: The Impact of Evolution on Victorian Fiction. New York: Corporate Press, 1940. Hennessy, Maurice. Congo: A Brief History and Appraisal. London: Pall Mall, 1961. Henty, George. By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War. London: Blackie and Son, 1884; New York: A.L.Burt, 1890. ——. The Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891. ——. St. George for England: A Tale of Cressy and Poitiers. New York: Mershon, 1891. ——. With Buller in Natal Or A Born Leader. London: Blackie & Son, 1901. ——. With Kitchener in the Soudan: A Story of Atbara and Omdurman. London: Blackie & Son, 1903. ——. With Lee in Virginia. Chicago: Henneberry, 1890. ——. With Roberts to Pretoria: A Tale of the South African War. London: Blackie & Son, 1902. ——. The Young Carthaginian. New York: Scribner and Welford, 1887. ——. The Young Colonists: A Story of the Zulu and Boer Wars. New York: Hurst, 1885. Hobson, John Atkinson. Imperialism: A Study. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1965. Honey, John Raymond de Symons. Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1977. Houghton, Walter Edwards. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830– 1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957.

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Huggins, Nathan et al., eds. Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. Vol.1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown at Oxford. London and New York: Macmillan, 1861. ——. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1911. Inglis, Fred. The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1981. Johnston, Harry Hamilton. British Central Africa: An Attempt to Give Some Account of a Portion of the Territories Under British Influence North of the Zambezi. New York: Negro UP, 1969. Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Killam, G.D. Africa in English Fiction, 1874–1939. Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press, 1968. Kingston, William Henry Giles. In the Wilds of Africa: A Tale for Boys. London and New York: T.Nelson & Sons, 1871. Kriegel, Abraham. “A Convergence of Ethics: Saints and Whigs in British Antislavery.” Journal of British Studies 26 (1987):423–450. Lewis, Roy, and Yvonne Foy. Painting Africa White: The Human Side of British Colonialism. New York: Universe Books, 1971. Lewis, Rupert. Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988 Lorimer, Douglas. Colour, Class and the Victorians. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978. MacCann, Donnarae, and Gloria Woodard, eds. The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism. New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1985. MacDonald, Robert. “A Poetics of War: Militarist Discourse in the British Empire, 1880–1918.” Mosaic 23. 3 (Summer 1990):17–35. ——. Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1993. MacDonald, Ruth. Literature for Children in England and America, 1646–1774. Troy: Whitston, 1982. MacKenzie, John, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986. Maddox, Gregory, ed. Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa: Conquest and Resistance to Colonialism in Africa. New York: Garland, 1993. ——. The Colonial Epoch in Africa. New York: Garland, 1993.

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Tiffin, Chris, and Allan Lawson, eds. De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Tiffin, Helen. “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse.” Kunapipi 9.3 (1987):17–34. Turnbaugh, Roy. “Images of Empire: George Alfred Henty and John Buchan.” Journal of Popular Culture 9 (Winter 1975):734–740 Ullendorff, Edward. Ethiopia and the Bible. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1968. Walvin, James. Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1973. Warner, Oliver. Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery. London: Constable, 1953. Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. London: André Deutsch, 1944. Wyss, Johann David. The Swiss Family Robinson. Cleveland: Collins/ World, 1974.

Index

Abolitionism, 8–14 connections with capitalism, 11–12 connections with colonizationn, 13–15 in Black Ivory, 55 Achebe, Chinua, 153, 155, 156, 161, 178, 181, 182n.4 adventure stories, 27 advent of, 27 coexistent with the school story, 27 conquest in, 28, 35 definition/ role of, 28 popularity of, 59n.2 Robinson Crusoe as model, 27–28, 35 affirmative action, 181–181 Africa as a site of negations, 19, 181 as colonial space for aggressive impulses, 113 as “Dark Continent”, 17–19 conquest of, 84 empires and kingdoms, 5, 84, 147 early historians’ views on, 3–3 image of, 14, 17, 74–76, 114 in Bleak House, 15–16 partition of, xxi, 65–66, 68–69 resistance to, 69, 74–76 slaves from, 3 Aidoo, Ata Ama, xvi American Colonization Society, 90 Anglo-Boer war, 119, 126, 127 antislavery debate, 8–14 humanitarinism, 8–14, 21n.l Ani, Marimba, 7 apartheid, 111–112 Arnold, Guy, xx, 64, 79, 81, 92, 93, 171

Arnold, Thomas, 26, 35–36, 38, 40, 58, 60n.10, 64, 93 Atlantic Slave Trade, The, xvi, xvii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 17, 21n.1, 27, 31, 34, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 90, 98, 181 African agency, 6, 55 abolition, 8, 10–12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22n.3, 49–50, 54, 55, 90, 98 Abolition Society, The, 10, 22n.6 British role in, 54 British ambivalence, 90criticism of, 50–50 colonization as cure, 50–51, 90 in Black Ivory, 55 Portuguese involvement, 3–4 royal family involvement, 3 Spanish involvement, 3–4 Bhabha, Homi, 60n.l2 child-parent metaphor in colonialist discourse in, 60n.12 Ballantyne, 26, 27, 43, 46, 51–52, 54–55, 58, 182n.3 Black Ivory, 26, 51–58 as antislavery novel, 54–55 "civilizing mission" in, 57 colonization issues, 55, 57 religion and art in, 55–57 Black(s), xi, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18–19, 81n.1, 87, 88, 90, 91, 148, 168, 181, 181 in London, 8–9 repatriation, 12–14, 90 youth, 178 Black Skin, White Masks, 166 Bleak House, 15 Boys’ Own Paper, The, 76 197

198 NARRATING AFRICA

Boy Scout Movement, x, 120, 121– 123, 124, 125, 134n.1, 135n.1 Brantlinger, Patrick, 17, 19, 161n.4 British Commonwealth, xx, xxiin.3 conquest of Africa, 84 Conrad’s criticism of, 138 resistance to, 84 economy, 8–9 empire/empirebuilding, xix, xxi, 64–69 anxiety over the future of, 147, 148, 149, 160 gentlemanliness, 85–86, 95, 98–100, 105, 128–129 Buchanan, Pat, xvii By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War, 20, 78, 80–81, 84–92 comic relief in, 91–92 economic motives in, 91 stereotypes in, 86–87 style in, 92 cannibalism, 31–33, 59n.4, 145 Capitalism and Slavery, 5, 14 Carlyle, Thomas, 16, 17, 24n.8, 38–39 as hero-worshipper, 38–39 chain of being, 16, 117, 133 Chapter of Adventures, A, 78 characterization in The Dash for Khartoum, 109 children’s literature, 25–25, 58n.1, 175 Christian Science Monitor, xxiin.3 Christianity as doctrine, 7–8 as cure for slavery, 7, 13, 15, 50–50, 55, 61n.15, 154, 155 conversion of African leaders, 69 Evangelical, 16 impact on traditional African values, 166 in Robinson Crusoe, 30 military imagery in, 130 origins, 22n.2 racial overtones in, 96–97 civilizing mission, 15, 57, 115 symbolic and economic rationale, 115 colonization, xv, xxi, 8, 14–15, 19, 27, 31, 35, 43, 46, 49, 50–51, 55, 57, 58, 64, 67, 88, 90, 105, 107–108, 125, 154, 155, 156, 158, 174, 176, 181 as divine duty, 108–109, 144 as salvation, 125 as slavery, 55 economic motive,

67–69, 91 effects of, 155, 165–166, 167 French, 178 in the Congo, 154 Colonization Society, 46 Conrad, Joseph, 13, xviii, xx, 19, 45, 137–138, 150–153, 155–158, 160–161 as Marlow, 158 comic relief, 91 Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, 8 Craton, Michael, 3–4, 22n.3 Darwinism, 87, 137–138, 145, 148 in King Solomon’s Mines, 146 Dash for Khartoum, The, 78, 93–101 British presence, 96 gentlemanliness in, 98–100 Islam, 96–97 Christianity, 96–97 race superiority, 98 stereotypes, 97–98, 109 Davidson, Basil, 6 Defoe, Daniel, 26–27, 31 De-Scribing Empire, xv, xxiin.1, 64 Dickens, Charles, 15, 16 discourse colonial, 32, 95, 101, 115, 176 of difference, 71 of representation, 76–76 of salvation, 95–96 of war, 70–72 as romance, 73 of “playing the game”, 71 postcolonial, xvii–xx, 60n.12, 161n.5, 176, 181 Dreams of Adeventure, Deeds of Empire, 28, 39, 41, 41, 45, 46 DuBois, W.E.B., 180 Dunae, Patrick, 77, 134 emancipation bill, 8, 14, 16, 46, 55 Empire Writes Back, The, 60n.l2 Ethnological Society, 74 ethnographic writings, 76–76 European colonization schemes, xv, 67–69 culture as cure, 50 interest in Africa, 67 involvement in Africa, 21n.1, 65 Fact in Fiction, xiv Fage, J.D., 3, 17, 18 Fanon, Frantz, xiv, 165, 166, 211

INDEX 199

fiction as social product, xv of empire, 13, xvi, 29, 55, 165 Garvey, Marcus, 180 George Alfred Henty: The Story of an Active Life, 79 Gilman, Sander, 20–21 Green, Martin, 28, 39, 45, 139 Haggard, Rider, 13, 137–150 Happiest Days, 36–39 Harlem Renaissance, 179 Held Fast for England, 64 Heart of Darkness, xviii, 19, 45, 137, 138, 150–161 Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, xvii Henty, George Alfred, 19–20, 46, 76–81 admirer of, 176–177 as influential writer, 20 “African” novels of, 78 defenders of, 170–172 economic interests in Africa, 134 heroes in works of, 79–81 historical novels of, 73–74 impact of his writings, 177 women in his works, 172–174 patriotism in, 76 racial tereotypes in, 74 style, 81 Henty Society, xx hero worship, 38–39 history teacher connections with imperialism, 175 Hughes, Thomas, 26–27, 35–36, 39, 40, 70 as hero-worshipper, 38–39 “muscular Christianity” defined by, 60n.10 Victorian public school, 36 imperial gothic novels, 147–148, 152 “going native,” 152, 155 regression, 153, 156, 157–159 imperialism, 31, 37–38, 45, 64, 66, 67, 71–72, 96, 98, 130–131, 134, 138, 144, 151–152, 153, 156, 165, 168, 175, 176, 182n.4 theories, xvii Imperialism and Juvenile Literaure, 25–25, 27, 46, 52, 77

In the Wilds of Africa, 26, 46–51 Atlantic Slavery Trade in, 52–53 David Livingstone’s influence on, 54 juvenile literature, 13, xvi, 21, 25, 25–27, 36, 46, 58, 70, 119, 179, 181, 181 as romance, 70 connections with empire, 46, 69Henty’s, 69 impact and legacy, 169–170, 178–179, 181, 184n.6 masculinity in, 129 morality, 169 King Solomon’s Mines, 137–150 as popular novel, 141 economic motives in, 149 racism in, 148–149 reincarnation in, 148 sexism in, 149–150 supernatural, 143 “White man’s burden,” 142 Kingston, W.H.G., 26, 27, 28, 46, 48, 50, 51, 58, 165 as member of the Colonization Society, 46 as prolific writer, 46 Lawson, Allan, xv, xx, xxin.1, 64 Life of Olaudah Equiano, The, 6 Livingstone, David, 15, 17, 39, 50, 54, 58, 152, 155 views on slavery, 61n.15, 15 Livingstone Search Expedition, 54 Location of Culture, The, 60n.l2 MacKenzie, John, 25, 25 juvenile literature, 25 McKay, Claude, 180 Marryat, Frederick, 26, 41 as an unpopular figure in the United States, 61 Masterman Ready, 26, 41–46 British colonial history in, 43–45 white man’s burden in, 43 Mill, John Stuart, 16, 24n.8 minstrelsy, 92 “missing link”, 138, 145–146 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, xvii muscular Christianity, 28, 37–38, 58, 118, 121, 129, 137

200 NARRATING AFRICA

Myth, Literature and the African World, xx, 181 Negritude, 179 New York Herald, 78 nineteenth century adventure novel, 28 evangelicalism, 129 fiction of empire, 55, 69–70 ideologies, xvii juvenile literature, 13, xvi, 119, 179, 181, 181 manliness, 130 public school, 36, 70, 118–119, 120, 169 noble savage, 30, 60n.7, 31 Friday as, 31–32 Montaigne’s idea of, 60n.7 in Haggard’s works, 137, 145 Oliver, Roland, 3, 17, 18 Osundare, Niyi, xvii–xviii pan-Africanism, 179–181, 184n.7 ambivalence, 179–181 plantation myth, 88–90, 98–98, 109–110 Powell, Enoch, xix public school, 36, 70, 118–119, 120, 122–123, 127–128, 131, 169, connections with Boy Scout Movement 39–40 militarization of, 39–40, 69–70, 71 Victorian, 70 in With Roberts in Pretoria, 127–128 imperialist connections, 168–169 repatriation, 90 race classification, 147, 161n.2 definition, 19 in The Dash for Khartoum, 98 in With Roberts in Pretoria, 131 relations, xix theories, 18 Race in North America, 3 racism in Heart of Darkness, 153, 155 racial classification, 147, 161n.2 repatriation, 8–14, 90 connections with colonization, 13–14 reverse colonization, 147–148, 156, 160 Robinson Crusoe, 26–35, 41 slavery in, 34–35 as romance, 34

Richards, Jeffrey, 25–26, 27, 36–37, 116 popular fiction, 25 Rise of the Novel, The, 30 Rockwell, Joan, xvi Said, Edward, 182n.4 Savage in Literature, The, 74 Self-Help, 129, 130 Short History of Africa, A, 17–18 Sierra Leone, 7, 69, 86 as colony, 8, 9, 13, 14, 66, 81n.1, 90 Small, Stephen, xvi Smedley, Audrey, 3–6 Smiles, Samuel, 129 Soyinka, Wole, xx, 181 stereotypes about Africa, 74–76, 86–87 about Boers, 116–117, 124–125 in By Sheer Pluck, 86 in Heart of Darkness, 160 in The Dash for Khartoum, 109 of Black characters, 45, 132 persistence of, 21 racial, 13, xvii Story, Alfred Thomas, 3 Through Three Campaigns, 78 Tiffin, Chris, xv, xxiin.1, 64 Helen, xvii Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 26, 31, 35–41, 118–119 empire-building in, 70 Victorian class concerns, 98, 103–105 explorers and missionaries, xvi, 15 Water-Babies, The, xv, xxin.1 Watt, Ian, 30 West African Berlin Conference, 65–66, 68–69 “White man’s burden”, 56, 76, 142, 143, 144 white supremacy, 111, 111, 120 Williams, Eric, 5, 14 With Buller in Natal, 78, 119–126 public school, 122 With Kitchener in the Soudan, 78, 94, 101–110 emigration in,

INDEX 201

104–105 middle-class concerns in, 103, 105, 106–107, 174 With Roberts in Pretoria, 78, 126–134 Wretched of the Earth, The, xv, 65 writers of empire, 143, 168–169, 182n.4 Young Colonists, The, 78, 100, 111, 112–119